WSJ's Farhad Manjoo applauds Amazon's Jeff Bezos for proposing new, friendlier uses for drones. Photo: Amazon.
Let's get this out of the way first: Jeff Bezos's announcement that Amazon.com Inc. is working on a way to deliver goods by unmanned aircraft was little more than puffery—a brilliantly wafted bit of vaporware that, like a lone drone making its way across a bleak landscape, arrived at its destination beautifully intact.
Though Mr. Bezos has no idea when drone delivery will become operational—the plan is blocked by U.S. regulation and is both technologically and economically questionable—his unveiling of the project on "60 Minutes" Sunday carried three important public-relations payloads for the firm.
First, the plan got everyone talking about Amazon and its Prime subscription service right at the start of the holiday shopping season—even, I'm sorry, this columnist. Next, it gave investors a taste of the scope of Amazon's investment plans, forestalling any expectation that the company plans to begin making big money soon. And it cemented Mr. Bezos's image as the biggest thinker in tech, a guy who won't let little things like "illegal," "implausible" and "kind of silly" stop him from considering better ways to deliver your toothpaste.
And yet, despite all this, I'm very happy Mr. Bezos is backing unmanned aerial vehicles. UAVs get a bad rap. They've become associated with surveillance and militarism, and most rational discussions of the technology are hijacked by fears of the imminent robotic takeover of our skies. While these are justified concerns, I fear they've gotten out of hand.
Jonathan Downey, CEO of autopilot-systems maker Airware. Bloomberg News
Too often, we worry solely about the worst possibilities of drones, without considering their substantial promise to improve much of the world around us. Long before they'll fly into our backyards with soap, we may see squads of them delivering medicine in developing countries, coordinating emergency relief after disasters, and monitoring crops to improve how we grow food. Are these and other potential applications worth considering, despite the risks of illegal surveillance or even more terrible uses of UAVs? We ought to have that conversation.
What are the non-evil possibilities of drones? "Isn't it funny—Jeff Bezos makes an announcement and I'm the one who's busy all day," says Andreas Raptopoulos, a drone-tech entrepreneur who has spent much of the week briefing journalists like me on the humane future of drones.
Mr. Raptopoulos is one of the founders of Matternet, a tiny Silicon Valley start-up that is building a UAV transportation system that he says will be useful in developing countries that lack passable roads. For the transportation of crucial goods, small drones have several distinct advantages over ground-based vehicles, he says. They're fast, energy efficient, and—most importantly—they don't require huge investments in infrastructure to start working.
A billion people around the world live in areas that aren't accessible by roads during all seasons, Mr. Raptopoulos adds. In such places, including large swaths of Sub-Saharan Africa, drones might deliver medicine or emergency-relief items without incurring the time, expense and environmental destruction associated with road building. In this way, drones are similar to cellphones, which blanketed the world with communication without incurring the cost of laying down copper lines.
Unlike Amazon's plan, which will apparently fly a drone from a central warehouse to your home, Matternet envisions creating a long-range transportation "network" that will allow UAVs to move goods between any two points in a country or even a continent. Matternet's inspiration is the Internet: When I load up Amazon.com on my Web browser, data get sent from the company's servers through dozens of intermediary routers and then, finally, to my PC. Matternet envisions blanketing a developing country with drone "landing stations" that would act like those routers.
To send a package from one station to any other, you would drop off your item—say, medicine needed urgently in a rural hospital—at your nearest station. A small drone would pick up your payload, and then it would hop from one landing station to the next on a path toward its destination. Because all drones would be managed by routing software, the network would prevent collisions and keep drones from flying in areas with inclement weather. It would allow for "bi-directionality," meaning that drones could carry payloads both ways through the system. Along the way, the drones would automatically swap out their used batteries for new ones, extending their range. With this network approach, the cost of transporting goods could be very low—about a dollar to carry a four-pound package for about 25 miles, Mr. Raptopoulos says.
All of this is far off. Matternet has received seed funding from the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, among other investors, and so far it has built a battery-swapping drone prototype, which it plans to field test next year. It is also working on the landing stations and the routing software. But Mr. Raptopoulos believes it will take years of work to make UAVs safe, reliable and cheap enough to compete with other transportation vehicles.
Even when the technology is ready, drone transportation won't be right for much of the world at first. It will be the best for sending high-value goods like medicine in countries without roads or in areas that have been sacked by natural disasters. But if you live in a big American city, you're more likely to see a self-driving truck drop off your AA batteries than to be visited by a UAV—at least for much of the next decade.
In the U.S. and much of the developed world, the most promising initial use for drones will be in agriculture, says Jonathan Downey, CEO of Airware, a startup that is making autopilot systems for commercial UAVs. "There's a huge multibillion-dollar business case for using drones to provide frequent, high-accuracy imaging of crops," says Mr. Downey. Still, his enthusiasm is tempered by the regulatory climate in the U.S. In part because of public fear, the Federal Aviation Administration has imposed strict limits on the use of commercial drones. "We don't expect the U.S. to be more than half of our market," Mr. Downey says.
But perhaps that will change, thanks to Amazon. Even if it's only smoke and mirrors, I'm hoping Mr. Bezos's announcement will prompt a more rational discussion of the costs and benefits of robotic birds in the sky.
Write to Farhad Manjoo at farhad.manjoo@wsj.com