I heard a segment on NPR this morning that made my eyes cross.
Amazon is trying to get their drone delivery service into 500 cities by the end of the year. They want to drop five-pound packages into your backyard. Sure. Fine. The problem they're having is dogs. Because obviously. If a buzzing mechanical bird drops out of the sky, a golden retriever is going to try and eat it.
So what did the engineers in Seattle do. They built "simulated dogs."
I'm serious. They use fake dogs in their testing facilities so the drone's collision system can practice avoiding an animal.
I'm trying to picture the meeting where this was approved. Someone in a fleece vest stood by a whiteboard and said they needed to code an algorithm for a dog. I don't know about you, but I have never met a dog that behaves like a line of code. You can't simulate a beagle that just smelled a squirrel. You can't program the chaotic energy of a terrier defending a rhododendron bush from a flying robot.
They think they can teach a drone to juke a labradoodle.
Down in North Haven they actually put the whole drone program on hold this month because everyone is complaining about the noise. Apparently it sounds like a swarm of angry bees. Now imagine an angry bee swarm hovering over a fenced-in yard with two dachshunds.
It just feels like nobody involved in this project has ever owned a dog. They probably think dogs just stand completely still and calculate trajectories.
Meanwhile the regular delivery guys in the vans are still out there dealing with actual dogs every single day. They get a little paw print icon on their app to warn them. The human beings get a little icon. The robots get a multimillion-dollar obstacle course.
I just don't understand the priorities. My neighbor's spaniel is going to tear one of these things out of the sky the second it clears the fence. I'm just going to buy my dish soap at Target.
Originally published on Substack.
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