Inside Solid: what won’t drones do?

How Moore's Law applies to drones — a backchannel meditation on drone limitations.

prime-air_high-resolution02Extrapolation is great fun — especially over technology, where Moore’s Law has conditioned us to expect exponentially falling costs and fast adoption. Applied to drones, extrapolation might lead us to conclude that they’ll fill the skies soon, delivering anything we want on demand. They are, after all, rapidly getting cheaper and smarter, and drone-related announcements get tons of press.

So, where will the drones stop? A few of us meditated on the limitations of drones last week on news that Facebook plans to use them to provide Internet connections to those who don’t have them, and on DHL’s announcement that it would begin making deliveries by drone to the island of Juist, in the North Sea. An edited excerpt of our exchange follows.

Jim Stogdill:

Yesterday at EmTech, Brandon Bass from 3D Robotics was asked about drones as a delivery service. His response was somewhat unexpectedly contrarian: “Drones are great at delivering things that are low weight but very high value (like antibiotics during an outbreak). I wouldn’t be focusing my time in the near term on things that are heavy, inexpensive, and available locally anyway. Also, the places with dense enough populations to come close to supporting the economics aren’t going to let you fly through their airspace.” — heavily, but I believe accurately, paraphrased.

BTW, it’s worth thinking about the energy efficiency of these things. For a long time, our obsession with immediacy has been costing us more and more in terms of inefficiency of the delivery mechanism. Trains, less efficient than canals. Trucks less than trains. Air freight less than trucks. Overnight air less efficient than all of them. It’s partially the shift in mode, but it’s also partially the more granular delivery patterns. There is no doubt in my mind that drone delivery will be less efficient than a UPS truck full to the brim with other people’s stuff (at some point I’ll do the math to prove it to myself), and we’ll pay for part of that inefficiency through price, and part of it through externalities.

Using a relatively inefficient vehicle to fly over a farm every day is 1) offset by the efficiency improvements elsewhere in the farm-as-system and 2) the total energy use is still quite low in magnitude, so probably a rounding error. But, if like Fedex before, we replace any significant portion of package delivery with a fundamentally inefficient system the scale will make the inefficiency matter.

Renee DiResta:

I agree. I hope that isn’t contrarian — it’s common sense and basic economics.

Nat Torkington:

Capacity to latency ratios play a role here, too: quick delivery of a few select goods vs. slower delivery of a lot of goods. “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes,” etc.

Marginal improvements in latency generally come with non-linear rise in cost (each unit of speed costs more than the last), whereas greater capacity often comes in the form of economies of scale (decreasing incremental cost). True revolutions (fibre for data!) are where latency becomes cheaper. Drones do not have that cost profile.

Alistair Croll:

On a slightly tangential narrative, I was talking to a Big Global Company Having Trouble Getting Out Of Its Own Way a few weeks ago. I asked them why Blockbuster wasn’t Netflix.

After a while we agreed that the problem was framing: Blockbuster was in the real estate business and addicted to late fees; Netflix was in the entertainment delivery business. This, I realized, let them see the US postal service as a very high throughput — very, very, very, high latency — broadband connection.

Another example of capacity to latency ratios and how smart organizations can arbitrage them to target specific market conditions.

Mike Loukides:

While I substantially agree with Jim’s comments about drones for delivery, I wouldn’t underestimate the willingness of some customers to pay a super premium to have a drone drop off a package at their front door. This is all about conspicuous consumption, and if you’re going to be conspicuous, you might as well be conspicuous to the max.

So, I don’t think we’ll see our neighborhoods buzzing with drones, but I do think we’ll see the occasional drone dropping off an iThing for an extra $200. You won’t even have to wait in line at the Apple store.

Lisa Mann:

Now I have an image in my head of people scheduling their drone deliveries for maximum attention in their neighborhoods. (Can you drive it twice around the block before dropping it off? Drop off the wedding gift in the middle of the ceremony? Can the drone drag a happy birthday banner behind it?)

Alistair Croll:

There’s an algorithm for that.

Amazon Alpha Mail.

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