I don't doubt that a delivery company would want to do things as cheaply as possible, but I also don't oppose regulations to prevent them from skimping on certain safety features. We do, for example, require Amazon delivery vehicles to follow all vehicle safety regulations (or, if there are cases where they're not enforced, they obviously ought to be).
It might be reasonable to worry that delivery drones will suddenly take over cities before regulations can even be put in place (although that apparently hasn't happened yet). But it's not reasonable to assume that there's something unique about drones that will make them inherently more impervious to reasonable regulations and thus inherently much more dangerous than, say, existing delivery automobiles and airplanes. In fact, I would expect any remotely competent deployment of delivery drones would be much safer than the delivery automobiles they replace, simply due to the baseline accident rate of automobiles.
> I also don't oppose regulations to prevent them from skimping on certain safety features.
> I would expect any remotely competent deployment of delivery drones would be much safer than the delivery automobiles they replace, simply due to the baseline accident rate of automobiles.
Why would you expect that a brand-new, mostly-unregulated technology would be safer than one that is over a century old with a lot of safety regulation in place? Even over the last several decades, safety regulation has reduced the per-mile as well as overall death rate of motor vehicles. [1] Regulation takes time and is often reactionary to large-scale problems.
How do you expect to define a "remotely competent deployment of delivery drones" given the general lack of experience in doing so?
Given the employee churn described in the article, do you think there is a culture of safety in this organization so deep that finding a fundamental+fatal flaw would be grounds for ceasing all drone-deliveries until the flaw is provably fixed?
From the article: “There was a lot of decision making made in the moment without long term thought to it. It was almost slinging shit at the wall and hoping stuff would stick.”
How can you justify better safety from something developed with constant engineering churn, short-term thinking and unreasonable time goals?
> Why would you expect that a brand-new, mostly-unregulated technology would be safer than one that is over a century old with a lot of safety regulation in place?
Because they have a very different risk profile. Regulations are trading heavy risks with cars. Drones are smaller and don't share space with humans on the ground during normal operations. That means they "only" have to coordinate with other air traffic while not falling out of the air at too high a rate.
It might be reasonable to worry that delivery drones will suddenly take over cities before regulations can even be put in place (although that apparently hasn't happened yet). But it's not reasonable to assume that there's something unique about drones that will make them inherently more impervious to reasonable regulations and thus inherently much more dangerous than, say, existing delivery automobiles and airplanes. In fact, I would expect any remotely competent deployment of delivery drones would be much safer than the delivery automobiles they replace, simply due to the baseline accident rate of automobiles.