Long gone are the days of ordering something (by mail or phone) and having it delivered days or weeks later by a human being in a truck. Gone are the days of endless anticipation waiting for your goodies to arrive, now gratification is coming more and more instantly.

Imagine this for a moment. You order something on Amazon.com for the holidays in order to avoid the throngs of shoppers or maybe you just don't want to get dressed. You click the Amazon Prime Air button and within a half-hour you hear what sounds like a weed-eater outside your house. You open the door, look up and spot an incoming drone holding a little yellow package with the trademark Amazon 'smile' on it. Boom! The wave of the future? Nope. Reality. Well, soon anyway...

 

 

Apparently the little guys will be entirely automated, no human drivers. These babies will find your location via GPS. There are a couple of catches though besides the fact that this service is scheduled for launch sometime in 2015 when the FAA is scheduled to release rules governing the use of drones: Try the fact that you'd have to live within 10 miles of the warehouse where the drones are based and that given the small size of the drone, you can't have anything delivered with a weight of over 5 pounds, but fret not. This accounts for 86% of everything that you might order on the all-encompassing website. And hey, if you're environmentally conscious, since these little guys are electronic that means much less air pollution, although it does beg the question of air congestion.

As with any new technology, new safety concerns arise too, but the FAA won't let these drones clutter the skies too much or at least will make sure to keep them closer to the ground where airplanes usually aren't allowed. But jeez it's already hard enough for pilots and air traffic control to keep an eyeball out for human-piloted traffic and crazy birds. Introduce automated flyers that can (and will) go haywire and somebody's gonna die. If that happens, I'll be picking off drones with my BB gun. Sorry Amazon. And whoever ordered the personal massager that they absolutely HAD to have so fast. My bad. Get a human being to help you out.

 

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