The Slow Collapse of Amazon's Drone Delivery Dream (wired.co.uk) 108
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Well over 100 employees at Amazon Prime Air have lost their jobs and dozens of other roles are moving to other projects abroad as the company shutters part of its operation in the UK, WIRED understands. Insiders claim the future of the UK operation, which launched in 2016 to help pioneer Amazon's global drone delivery efforts, is now uncertain. Those working on the UK team in the last few years, who spoke on condition of anonymity, describe a project that was "collapsing inwards," "dysfunctional" and resembled "organized chaos," run by managers that were "detached from reality" in the years building up to the mass redundancies.
They told WIRED about increasing problems within Prime Air in recent years, including managers being appointed who knew so little about the project they couldn't answer basic work questions, an employee drinking beer at their desk in the morning and some staff being forced to train their replacements in Costa Rica. Amazon says it still has staff working for Prime Air in the UK, but has refused to confirm headcount. [...] An Amazon spokesperson says it will still have a Prime Air presence in the UK after the cuts, but refuses to disclose what type of work will take place. The spokesperson also refused to confirm, citing security reasons, if any of the test flights that once filled promotional videos will still take place in the UK. The spokesperson adds that the company has found positions in other parts of its business for some affected employees and that it will keep growing its presence in the region. The spokesperson did not confirm how many employees were offered other jobs internally.
They told WIRED about increasing problems within Prime Air in recent years, including managers being appointed who knew so little about the project they couldn't answer basic work questions, an employee drinking beer at their desk in the morning and some staff being forced to train their replacements in Costa Rica. Amazon says it still has staff working for Prime Air in the UK, but has refused to confirm headcount. [...] An Amazon spokesperson says it will still have a Prime Air presence in the UK after the cuts, but refuses to disclose what type of work will take place. The spokesperson also refused to confirm, citing security reasons, if any of the test flights that once filled promotional videos will still take place in the UK. The spokesperson adds that the company has found positions in other parts of its business for some affected employees and that it will keep growing its presence in the region. The spokesperson did not confirm how many employees were offered other jobs internally.
It was always a dumb idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, lets set aside the general stupidity of the whole thing and focus on one.
Drones can't carry much weight. They just can't carry much, and most of what they will be able to carry will be just packaging for the thing that was purchased. So, you gonna develop this hyper advanced AI powered autonomous flying delivery system to... deliver a few ounces tops? Hardly seems worth it.
Re:It was always a dumb idea (Score:4, Insightful)
For me, the real problem is that this requires that nobody be a crook. I can see a future where literal pirate drones attack and down a delivery drone, steal it's cargo, and fly away to their pirate captain owner.
Re: It was always a dumb idea (Score:2, Interesting)
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Re: It was always a dumb idea (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: It was always a dumb idea (Score:5, Funny)
You can get them right from the US military. Just piss them off enough and they deliver them right to your home.
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True. No exceptions made.
Hell, even the CIA had to open PO Boxes abroad to get them delivered.
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https://www.hobbylinc.com/htm/... [hobbylinc.com]
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Amazon Basics has a copy, but it has about a 1:10 chance of exploding on launch :-/
Way cheaper, though!
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Where drone delivery makes sense is lightweight packages (the majority of Amazon shipping) to rural addresses. It makes little sense to drive a ton of vehicle and an operator on a 50 kilometer round trip to deliver 5 kilos of stuff. There are several types of drones which could do it, unmanned, for a fraction of the price currently. The emphasis on custom development of their own hardware/software rather than purchasing expertise from others seems guaranteed to delay the project beyond what is reasonable
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It will screw the airports.
Mandate the drones operate in class G airspace only. Require them to be equipped with mode S transponders. Classify them as the "most maneuverable" aircraft type for purposes of right of way. Put the burden of proof with regard to liability on the operator of the drone in the event of an incident. They are now no longer a problem for the vast majority of fields (or air traffic in general).
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Significant? depends on how you define it.
How does ~150 to 200lbs sound? [youtube.com]
other than your point about it screwing with airports I agree with all your points. Commercial operations would obey no-fly zones around airports and elsewhere.
That said we don't need swarms of drones, of any size, buzzing around everywhere.
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I can see a future where literal pirate drones attack and down a delivery drone, steal it's cargo, and fly away to their pirate captain owner.
I can see a future where regular old porch pirates have it easier and still come out ahead.
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Re:It was always a dumb idea (Score:4, Interesting)
Much simpler. Just shoot them down when they're flying over uninhabited ground. Depending on their technology, this needn't even be a physical projectile that downs them.
Thinking back to the first "drones" in use, the V1 was usually downed not by shooting it but by pilots flying parallel to it and nudging it with their wings. If you don't ponder how a potential enemy can thwart your autonomous flying machines, you're probably in for a pretty nasty surprise.
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Thinking back to the first "drones" in use, the V1 was usually downed not by shooting it but by pilots flying parallel to it and nudging it with their wings.
That is until the allies deployed radar guided anti aircraft guns shooting radar fuzed shells. At that point the guns were downing over 80% of the V1s that came within range, which was most since the launch sites were known.
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Remember that these things now have to survive the delivery by UPS. If they can survive being treated like soccer balls by the average delivery person, they can survive the crash.
Re:It was always a dumb idea (Score:4, Insightful)
As for the packages being too heavy people always thinking absolutes. A lot of Amazon's packages are pretty tiny and if even 50% of their drivers could be replaced by robots that would be a huge cost savings.
I keep bringing up the Business Insider article about that study showing at 70% of middle class jobs or lost due to process improvement and automation. The study is accurate and well sourced but nobody really noticed all those jobs going away. My factory packed up all the heavy machinery and moved it to Mexico or China you noticed that. When that factory just uses attrition to get rid of employees that doesn't need anymore you don't notice that.
Automation isn't this quite sudden thing anymore like it was in the time of the Luddites. It's a gradual chipping away. Like boiling a frog only the frog is smart enough to jump out of the water
Re:It was always a dumb idea (Score:5, Funny)
shrinkage (Google the term if you don't know what it is)
I've swam in Lake Superior, I know what shrinkage is.
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Even the heavy packages can be done with drones, they just won't fly and instead be wheeled drones.
Whenever I have heard about Amazon doing drones, my understanding was that a carrier vehicle would drive into a neighborhood, and all the drones would swarm from there, in that case, wheeled robots wouldn't be much more difficult than the flying ones.
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Like Amazon's Scout?
https://www.aboutamazon.com/ne... [aboutamazon.com]
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Likely bigger, that looks like something my toothpaste would come in.
But yeah, wheeled robots are easy at this point, as long as they aren't moving >20 mph, the navigation ability isn't terribly hard.
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If you're a C-level you don't just think in terms of the cost savings from firing one worker you think about the cost savings of changing how the labor market functions as a whole. People often ask what makes C-levels valuable that's
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Not just worker salary and benefits (often most costly than the salary), but deliveries are done by contractors who have their own profit and overhead. If drones, and/or drone carriers, are dispatched directly from the Fulfillment Center you've eliminated a huge portion of your cost for delivery.
So tens of thousands of drivers, tens of thousands of vehicles, and thousands of contracted delivery companies (most of them small businesses).
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Re: It was always a dumb idea (Score:1)
I didn't say outsourcing (Score:2)
I get that it's fun to troll, and if you're lucky maybe you're being paid to do this, but is it really worth it? Give it another 10 years and you'll be replaced by a bot. Heck maybe you already
True Luddism (Score:2)
Automation isn't this quite sudden thing anymore like it was in the time of the Luddites.
It has never been a sudden thing, but given that the rate of technological change is higher than it used to be, it is more sudden now than it used to be.
Every technological innovation has created more jobs than it has destroyed. Just prior to the pandemic, there were more humans employed than at any other time in history. Not in spite of all the technological changes that have happened, but because of them.
True Luddism is fighting against technological innovations, based on a belief that the opposite is t
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> The value of replacing your entire delivery staff with robots outweighs any shrinkage. ... What about shrinkage of staff robots? Them drones might be mighty useful, especially if you can coopt them to deliver to you on command.
Re:It was always a dumb idea (Score:4, Interesting)
IMHO the primary problem is efficiency of scale. UPS works because you can load a hundred packages onto a single truck, and have that truck go house-to-house delivering those packages, reducing the total distance traveled to hit all those stops. If you need to deliver packages from distribution center D to houses 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, your route is
Due to the limited capacity and battery life of a drone, it has to fly from Amazon's distribution center, to the house, back to the distribution center for nearly every single package.
It simply doesn't scale like delivering via truck does. There's almost no reduction in distance traveled the more packages you deliver. Once you exceed a certain number of packages on a truck, even the straight-line path traveled by a drone isn't enough to offset the shorter distance traveled by the truck.
It's the same reason Fedex was successful compared to the USPS. The USPS basically did point-to-point delivery all over the country. Fedex realized that if you routed all those deliveries through a single hub, even though the average distance traveled per package was higher, the total distance traveled by your delivery vehicles would be lower because you could increase the number of packages per vehicle.
For the same reason, drone delivery of pizza (food) might actually work. Those are highly time-constrained, so on average each delivery driver is only dropping off 1-2 pizzas at a time. You can't sit and wait until you have two dozen pizza orders, and put them all into a single truck for delivery. So there's not much scaling efficiency loss for sending out one drone per pizza.
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I don't think the plan is D => 1 => D => 2 => D => 3, it's more likely to be D => d1, d2, d3 => C1 => d2 => 1, d2 =>2, d3 => 3, where a flotilla of drones (aerial and/or wheeled) are loaded on a carrier, which is dispatched to a central location and then each drone does its own thing and returns to the carrier. Rural delivery is where aerial drones will make the most economic sense, since a 100 pound autonomous electric drone is going to be much more economical and probably
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Where exactly is a 100 pound drone going to land without being a hazard?
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Why does it have to land? Zipline has delivered over a million medical products in several countries in Africa by drone and the only landings are at their distribution centers. If you've never heard of them check it out, they're incredibly cool. The day they open operations in Peru they're getting an updated copy of my resume (they already have one).
https://flyzipline.com/ [flyzipline.com]
There are also other delivery methods, like lowering the cargo on a winch. For that matter, even if you insist on landing as long as
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Re: It was always a dumb idea (Score:2)
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No, it doesn't require that nobody be a crook. First off, drones have cameras and GPS it would be stupid to get into the habit of downing them. But let's leave that aside .. one in how many deliveries do you think the drone gets downed? They can probably make these cheap. I am sure they have done teswt runs, and I havent heard of those drones being downed. Therefore drone pirating must be quite rare. Maybe even rare enough to justify the expense against packages stolen from front porches. I'm sure if they
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So, you gonna develop this hyper advanced AI powered autonomous flying delivery system to... deliver a few ounces tops? Hardly seems worth it.
As opposed to the fact that they've already offered unlimited no-cost shipping and have no order minimums. Do you realize how many tubes of toothpaste are singly delivered by a delivery driver alongside nothing else?
I rational company would realize they're bleeding money and find a way to curb this. A company that still has startup mentality will just add a new way to bleed money.
Re: It was always a dumb idea (Score:3, Interesting)
They aren't bleeding money. The delivery cost is embedded in the prices of other products from that seller, and is paid for not only by Amazon customers, but by all of the seller customers, since one of Amazon's monopolistic contractual clauses is that sellers who want to sell to Amazon are forbidden from charging less at other stores than they charge on Amazon. So that toothpaste is likely costing twice or thrice as much as it should, everywhere.
This is so profitable for Amazon (and so rent-extracting for
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The unit (Prime Air) is bleeding money like a startup. That the company has money to pay for it is not the point.
Likewise, individual deliveries are often in the red. Not many 3rd party sellers are offering lightweight inexpensive items at regular retail - but Amazon itself is. Even if they make up the slack in bulk, they'd probably still like to maximize profit on the individual level.
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individual deliveries are often in the red.
Some are as loss leaders driving purchase of things that aren't.
Even if they make up the slack in bulk, they'd probably still like to maximize profit on the individual level.
That makes no sense. For a company the size of Amazon there's simply "maximize profit". The details are unimportant as long as the curve of profitability was maximized. Bulk or individual are mere parameters in equation, while the only thing that matters is the end result.
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This is not quite right if you read through their SEC filings. Their enterprise and cloud systems are the only major profitable endeavor (to a point in which they have completely taken over the low end of cloud storage and solutions), and all of their other business units are either very marginally profitable, breakeven, or bleeding money.
Amazon uses their enterprise and cloud to essentially subsidize all their other business units. If you spun those other business units off of Amazon, they would most likel
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I have to admit, it's interesting to work at a company that has so much cash on hand that "Failure Is An Option" is a real thing. They can throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks, which is about as innovative as you can get in today's business world. I saw a million dollar project crash and burn (through no fault of the staff involved, problem was with the hardware manufacturer), in most companies everyone involved with have been tossed out the door or have at least have a permanent stain on their ima
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Re: It was always a dumb idea (Score:4, Funny)
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Drones can't carry much weight.
This is untrue. There are drones that can carry up to ~10kg for private purchase and professional drones can carry more. The big thing you trade with heavy load drones is distance/speed. You aren't going very far if you're hauling ~20kg OR you're not getting there very fast. One thing Amazon was trying to do to get around the trade off was developing drones with airfoils to generate lift so that the rotors could be used for the speed part. However, the catch with that is you need surface area and that
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Amazon, NASA and some arm of the French government are working on an automated air traffic control system for drones, which I think is a necessity if you're going to deploy any large number of them.
Re:It was always a dumb idea (Score:4, Informative)
Drones can't carry much weight. They just can't carry much, and most of what they will be able to carry will be just packaging for the thing that was purchased. So, you gonna develop this hyper advanced AI powered autonomous flying delivery system to... deliver a few ounces tops? Hardly seems worth it.
While I think the concept is dumb, your assessment of their carrying capacity is way off. There are commercial ag and cinema drones that can carry significant payloads already on the market. The Dragon X12 U11 cinema drone, for example, can carry up to 100lbs of payload, including a 16 lb camera on its stock gimbal. DJI's Agras T20 carries a 20 liter (5.3 gallon) spray tank for crop spraying.
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Seems like the solution to this would be to use a blimp or blimp/drone combination. Of course then it would be large.
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Drones can't carry much weight.
I can't think of a single package I ordered from Amazon in the past 6 months that can't be lifted by a small hobby drone, let alone one of the many drones out there that actually are designed to carry weight.
Not everyone is ordering 60" LCD TVs.
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It's one thing to barely lift a package off the ground. It's another to carry it to a site a mile away.
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A mile away? Congrats, you have demonstrated you have no idea what Amazon Air is or what they were planning to do. Maybe read up on what they were proposing before you complain about some irrelevant condition which you made up.
Re: It was always a dumb idea (Score:1)
Re: It was always a dumb idea (Score:1)
Drones can't carry much weight.
A hybrid VTOL//ifting-body design could carry plenty of weight but it'd have to be big enough to hold plenty of cargo - internally. Jet turbine-powered (no EV here) with possible fold-away rotors for VTOL mode.
Drone delivery might be an infeasible idea but it's hardly dumb; - there's nothing billionaires won't resort to when scheming how to steal the paychecks of the few who still have jobs.
An employee drinking beer at their desk? HEAVENS (Score:2)
It's just so weird to include that in a list of otherwise-uncontroversial Bad Things causing a company to collapse.
Anonymous sources at the imploding company report an IT department struggling for days to find the "any" key, division heads who nearly starved to death after forgetting how to unlock the toilet cubicles, a former chief of accounting who embezzled over five million dollars from the company's coffers, at least one employee caught sticking pushpins into a large pencil eraser so as to form a littl
Re:An employee drinking beer at their desk? HEAVEN (Score:5, Insightful)
The employee is having problems at work and dealing with them by drinking either to cope or in an attempt to be fired.
Management either isn't paying attention to what is going on or doesn't care.
It is a sign of a bad workplace and bad management.
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Or the person's simply an alcoholic. Pretty much every experienced supervisor has has a problem with someone drinking on the job.
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Or the person's simply an alcoholic. Pretty much every experienced supervisor has has a problem with someone drinking on the job.
No. Poor supervisors have problems with alcoholics drinking on the job. Experienced supervisors have a problem of alcoholics coming drunk to the job, and even then are able to manage that.
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It could just show the employee wanted a beer. Maybe they were out late with coworkers the night before and had too many, and are trying to chase off a hangover. An employee having one beer at his/her desk ought not be a concern (regardless of time). An employee having a string of beers at his/her desk, getting smash drunk in the office, is a concern.
Prior to COVID, we had 2 kegs in the office. Most days they went fairly untouched, but I routinely would grab a cup with my lunch on Fridays, and no one th
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Then the company got bought by Canadians and that was the end of office beer (I didn't stick around for that). Office culture changed along with that, and I would imagine someone drinking at their desk after that would have drawn a few looks, or remarks from a manager.
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If it doesn't interfere with business operations they really don't care. We used to have a Friday afternoon cocktail hour with the adjoining department in our previous building, generally starting about 14:00, the rest of the week the bottles sat on the window sill (visible from outside) and folks would occasionally add a shot to their coffee or soda. Brought a bottle of my homemade blackberry wine one time, that was a big hit.
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Excuse me but what the ever loving fuck are you talking about?
I've been drinking with several large groups of friends over the years and never once witnessed any sexual harassment either between the sexes or between the same sex for those of the group that swing that way.
Alcohol doesn't make you a sexual harasser, it just makes you a little more who you are. So if you're constantly having to fight the urge to harass somebody, I'm sure alcohol will level you right up to doing it. Those with some human dece
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Excuse me but what the ever loving fuck are you talking about?
I've been drinking with several large groups of friends over the years and never once witnessed any sexual harassment either between the sexes or between the same sex for those of the group that swing that way.
Alcohol doesn't make you a sexual harasser, it just makes you a little more who you are. So if you're constantly having to fight the urge to harass somebody, I'm sure alcohol will level you right up to doing it. Those with some human decency in them won't.
Alcohol has been synonymous with "getting laid" and "sexual lubricant" for decades now. Perhaps step out of the convent once in a while to realize this.
Also realize we're at a point where looking at the opposite sex for too long, is considered "harassment". Welcome to modern feminism. And you wonder why MGTOW is a thing.
It's only "slow" (Score:3, Insightful)
if you had completely unrealistic sci-fi fantasy expectations in the first place. Anyone with a grasp of physical reality saw this was not feasible at any kind of scale beyond a demonstration.
A lot like 3D printing (it's a game changer! Factories are dead! Download a car!) or VR headesets (100 million people will own one by 2019!). Or any of the ridiculous space fantasies that nerds entertain as a kind of atheist pseudo-religion (Leave the Earth! Only the worthy shall ascend!)
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And if you were around in the 1960's (I was), we were supposed to have flying cars by now.
Re: It's only "slow" (Score:2)
Aren't those fantasies similar for theist, actually religious folk?
Heaven and Hell, for those who believe in getting into those immediately after they die, aren't expected to be anywhere on Earth, while for those who expect them after a resurrection it's usually associated with the idea of God first disassemblin the Universe then making a new one for them to inhabit. And for those who believe in reincarnation, getting back to Earth is usually seen as punishment, the goal being to never, ever return.
Which go
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"and by 2030 human drivers would be banned"
Oh don't worry , if self driving cars ever do become a reality a combination of insurance premiums and nanny state risk averse authorities will make sure that comes about pretty soon afterwards.
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Mercedes was working on self-driving cars in the mid-'90s, they fully expected to have self-driving as an option in their vehicles by 2008 (fuel cell powered ones, too). Some things just turn out to be a **LOT** harder than they initially appear.
Just like that harebrained balloon-Internet idea (Score:2, Insightful)
What is it with these power-tripping CEOs? They become obsessed with everything in the air, whether it makes sense or not. I think it's a reflection of their over-inflated egos, which are permanently sky high.
Re: Just like that harebrained balloon-Internet id (Score:1)
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The balloon idea actually worked, by changing altitude they can get into winds that move them back towards their desired station. The project was abandoned because Starlink is going to be cheaper, faster, and have global coverage.
Because Ego. (Score:2)
You're talking about hyper competitive douche bags with more money than god. They compete with each other for the only thing left that the other guy doesn't have or can't get - your attention.
I haven't paid enough attention to how any of them are personally to know if they're narcissists, but it would stand to reason more are than aren't.
At least bezos has space⦠(Score:1)
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Can't Say I'm Surprised.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Jeff Bezos rocket company Blue Origin isn't doing much innovating, so I'm not surprised that his drone system is stagnating. He's frittering away his energies on too many other things.
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Other than producing the most environmentally friendly rocket to date and experimenting and demonstrating completely different fuel types from everyone else in the industry. Yeah we get it, it just doesn't have the sex appeal of landing a booster vertically that makes us splooge every time we see a SpaceX logo. #notmyinnovation.
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Blue Origin has been a side hobby for Bezos for a long time, now that he's stepped down as CEO he says that he's going to be spending more time at BO. I'd look for aggressive hiring and some epic ass-kicking of the execs that have been slow-walking the project.
Dilbert is real (Score:2)
So, a typical large organization. Next!
failed - as I predicted (Score:1)
Damn! (Score:2)
Quelle surprise (Score:2)
There was so much wrong with this idea from the outset.
For starters, most people really do not like drones - sure, "hey this is fun!", with a cheap-ass plastic piece of crap, for about 10 minutes.
But when it's not them in charge of it, but the neighbours kid and this almighty racket with a camera attached is unsteadily flinging itself around your private space, that's a different matter.
But we're talking about very large, very heavy, very expensive drones in terms of Amazons vision - what could possibly go
Where Can Anyone Fly a Drone in Silicon Valley? (Score:2)
trunk delivery (Score:2)
Is beer worse than Scotch? (Score:2)
I sometimes drink Scotch at my desk in the morning. I don't think that is evidence my employer is doing something wrong.
helium (Score:2)
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There are plenty of drones out there capable of transporting that much weight. The energy density in batteries is steadily increasing.
Re: Drone delivery was always kinda stupid (Score:2)
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The FAA is already working on a system. https://www.faa.gov/uas/resear... [faa.gov]
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Electronics, jewellery and books make up a decent chunk of Amazon's sales and they're much more suitable for drone delivery.
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Duh!
I'm guessing they wouldn't send that sort of stuff by air.
This would only be used by people with too much money who want a bag of coffee or an Edwardian-beard trimmer delivered on a livestream to impress their hipster friends.
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This article [dronetechplanet.com] suggests there are many drone capable of transporting 40lbs, or more. I agree that drone delivery is not ideal for every situation, but I can see many use cases. For a typical suburban neighborhood, with 1/4 to 1/2 acre lots, a delivery truck could park in a fairly central spot, then deploy 8 or 10 drones. A single drone could carry 2-3 packages, and make those deliveries in less than 10 minutes, following the neighborhood streets so as to not fly over anyone's house or property. Heavier pa