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The Future of Package Delivery (and Expediting?)

OntarioVanMan

OntarioVanMan

Retired Expediter
Owner/Operator
Imagine the uproar...when Henry Ford introduced the assembly line....lots of jobs lost....progress marches on and we just have to adapt as a species...has nothing to do with being an American, nor Canadian or specific nationality...we are all members of the human race...
 
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WanderngFool

Active Expediter
OntarioVanMan said:
Imagine the uproar...when Henry Ford introduced the assembly line....lots of jobs lost....progress marches on and we just have to adapt as a species...has nothing to do with being an American, nor Canadian or specific nationality...we are all members of the human race...
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What if it's different this time? Old jobs aren't really replaced by new jobs. Old jobs are destroyed and that's one trend line. New jobs are created and that's another trend line. If the two trends lines are close together there isn't too much pain, but we're seeing old jobs disappear at a far greater rate than new jobs are being created.

I'd dig up the blog post but I'd use up my NYT freebies for the month and probably not find it. Paul Krugman was responding to a fellow economists book a week or two ago. The book painted a dismal jobs picture and Krugman disagreed saying that he thought that in just a decade or two things might begin to turn around. So he agreed that the next 10 or 20 years look bleak? Very depressing.
 
OntarioVanMan

OntarioVanMan

Retired Expediter
Owner/Operator
WanderngFool said:
What if it's different this time? Old jobs aren't really replaced by new jobs. Old jobs are destroyed and that's one trend line. New jobs are created and that's another trend line. If the two trends lines are close together there isn't too much pain, but we're seeing old jobs disappear at a far greater rate than new jobs are being created.

I'd dig up the blog post but I'd use up my NYT freebies for the month and probably not find it. Paul Krugman was responding to a fellow economists book a week or two ago. The book painted a dismal jobs picture and Krugman disagreed saying that he thought that in just a decade or two things might begin to turn around. So he agreed that the next 10 or 20 years look bleak? Very depressing.
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tough titty said the kitty...slowdown immigration and train the people we have now...stop or slowdown this population explosion....OR some being so picky where and when they want to work....North Dakota looks better all the time...with a .9% unemployment figure....yep .9%
 
Mailer

Mailer

Veteran Expediter
Owner/Operator
"Scott, beam me up." "Better yet, beam the the whole rig, me, my wife and a dog too." LOL, so much for the drone and a driveless truck:)
 
Deville

Deville

Not a Member
At some point there can be only so many jobs that can be eliminated from the job market before the industrial market suffers. If people can't work or earn enough money to survive all these manufactors, importers will have no one to buy enough merchandise to make a profit & driver less trucks will have no where to deliver to. All this technology is great but when huge companies can't look past the bottom line that is beyond the bottom line of today they will find out the savings today amounts to a loss tomorrow. It really is cutting off your nose to spite your face. I've seen this happen a couple of times in less than 10 years.
 
spongebox1

spongebox1

Expert Expediter
ATeam said:
Diane and I recently toured the factory in which the gym equipment we will purchase is built. All welding there is done by machine. They have people working there who they call welders and who went to school for welding. Their job is to maintain the machines.
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I have a friend who works in a place in a position such as this, his job is to repair the welds the the robots fail to weld correctly! Point of my comment is that even though you program a machine to do a job it is still subject to a mistake, regardless of the program regardless of the machine mistakes will still occur and human correction will still be needed.

Sent from my VS910 4G using EO Forums mobile app
 
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mjmsprt40

Veteran Expediter
Owner/Operator
Steady Eddie said:
FAA- You have to file a flight plan. Unsure how long it will take to approve said flight plan.
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Uh--- maybe not. If the flights stay out of protected airspace around the major airports, if they stay below certain minimum altitudes, if they fly only during good weather--- nope. Civil aviation flies all the time without flight plans, and I happen to know for a fact that R/C aviation is done every weekend by the weekend warriors with no-not-any flight plans being filed. It's not required unless you fly under instrument flight rule conditions or unless you're flying in the controlled airspace around the major airports. These drones would only fly under visual flight rule conditions, so--- nope.
 
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skyraider

skyraider

Veteran Expediter
US Navy
EnglishLady said:
"The UAVs do not currently have the awareness of their environment to be able to avoid flying into people. To deliver goods to people's homes for example in residential areas, the UAVs must overfly densely populated towns and cities, something that today's regulations prevent. "

Could be nasty if you are working in the garden ! :eek:



"Other things to consider are security of the goods during the transit. With no one to guard them the aircraft and package could be captured and stolen," he said.

Follow that drone :rolleyes:

Excerpts taken from ...
BBC News - Amazon testing drones for deliveries
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A drone could fly over a garden in Bison, open the bombbay doors, drop out the tomatoe seeds and keep going, prepaid air delivery,,,aaaaaaamen.
 
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mjmsprt40

Veteran Expediter
Owner/Operator
VlST2wamazon-drone-lost-present-birthday-ecards-someecards.png
 
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Hightech_Hobo

Expert Expediter
I am not smart enough to think of all the un intended consequences....but the trend is undeniable. We are at the beginning of a new age....

Robotics in all it's forms is here...now...implementation is the next step...moores law will make it happen faster than we expect....

Along with that will come huge advances in medicine that will allow us all to live longer than ever before...

Sooooo....lets just throw some numbers around...not real numbers..but the trend will be correct...

Right now lets say 300 million Americans total.....50 million are too old, sick or for whatever reason not in workforce...so we need 250 million jobs to keep us all employed....

Currently we have say, 200 million jobs, leaving 50 million of us able, but unemployed....

Enter serious automation.....lets say 100 million jobs go automated....10 million jobs created to maintain these new machines...leaves 90 million unemployed....forever.....

Remember when it was up to the consumer to "save" the economy?....but consumers no longer have an income to pay for those goods anymore...

Having WAY too much time on my hands these days...I roll this concept over and over in my head and can only conclude that the current economic model is no longer feasible....and am not near smart enough to invision one that would work....

Expand this world wide...it truly boggles my simple mind.....

Everything is going to change....it simply has to....this will not make many people happy as core values will have to change...

We are in for a very tumultuous, not so distant, future.
 
OntarioVanMan

OntarioVanMan

Retired Expediter
Owner/Operator
yes sir....and the U.S. isn't alone in this struggle to diversify....That is why it goes against the grain to be an isolationist....to re enact high tariffs and "protect" our turf....the world will simply go around us now and leave us behind....yes....imagine that....The US might just be better off selling protection services to make commercial use of the militarys firepower and recoup the cash investment....
 
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WanderngFool

Active Expediter
That's amazing! I love what he said about the copters having a block of addresses. So when Freightliner, Peterbilt etc start doing driverless trucks they'll probably be buying a block of addresses too. But it wouldn't be nearly as fun or as cool to hack into a truck... Yeah but it could be profitable. :) Imagine a sophisticated thief giving the truck instructions on where to drive to and sending fake gps coords back to the owner. A nice and easy megabucks heist.

I had another thought on what might slow down adoption of this stuff. Won't the individual states have to approve driverless trucks on their roadways? If so, it will slow down adoption of this technology.
 
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WanderngFool

Active Expediter
I want a drone that can scout the road ahead and warn me about traffic jams and chicken coops that are open. I'll settle for just the chicken coop version.
 
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