{"id":125052,"date":"2021-07-16T19:22:23","date_gmt":"2021-07-17T02:22:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/07\/amazon-patented-a-new-delivery-system-that-could-have-your-block-crawling-with-robots"},"modified":"2021-07-16T19:22:23","modified_gmt":"2021-07-17T02:22:23","slug":"amazon-patented-a-new-delivery-system-that-could-have-your-block-crawling-with-robots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/07\/amazon-patented-a-new-delivery-system-that-could-have-your-block-crawling-with-robots","title":{"rendered":"Amazon Patented a New Delivery System That Could Have Your Block Crawling With Robots"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/amazon-patented-a-new-delivery-system-that-could-have-your-block-crawling-with-robots2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Last week, Amazon patented a delivery system involving self driving trucks carrying several small robots that deliver packages to homes.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Once all the small delivery bots are back on board, the truck (which would have a human driver in the near future but likely be <a href=\"https:\/\/singularityhub.com\/2018\/08\/23\/the-future-of-cars-is-electric-autonomous-and-shared-heres-how-well-get-there\/\">autonomous<\/a> in the less-near future) drives off to the next block\u2014its fleet of mini-me\u2019s restocking with new packages en route\u2014and the scene repeats itself.<\/p>\n<p>Cool\/creepy? Good\/bad? Depends on your perspective. On the one hand, <a href=\"https:\/\/singularityhub.com\/2019\/07\/22\/will-robots-take-our-jobs-careful-its-a-trick-question\/\">employing fewer humans<\/a> would bring Amazon more cost savings in the long run, which it would ideally pass on to customers and re-invest in other parts of the business, leading to hiring <i>more<\/i> people in a <a href=\"https:\/\/singularityhub.com\/2019\/02\/13\/ai-wont-create-a-skills-gap-heres-what-will-happen-instead\/\">virtuous circle<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>But on the other hand, it\u2019s not hard to imagine the secondary vehicles going awry; there would be plenty of obstacles for them to get around (dogs, bikes, sprinklers, and children are just a few that come to mind), and given how hard it\u2019s been to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2021\/05\/24\/technology\/self-driving-cars-wait\">bring self-driving cars<\/a> to market, Amazon may be <a href=\"https:\/\/singularityhub.com\/2021\/05\/06\/to-advance-ai-we-need-to-better-understand-human-intelligence-and-address-these-4-fallacies\/\">underestimating<\/a> the challenge of maneuvering the small delivery vehicles even 100 feet from truck to doorstep.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week, Amazon patented a delivery system involving self driving trucks carrying several small robots that deliver packages to homes. Once all the small delivery bots are back on board, the truck (which would have a human driver in the near future but likely be autonomous in the less-near future) drives off to the next [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":359,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,6,1491],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-125052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-robotics-ai","category-transportation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125052","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/359"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125052"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125052\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}