Aside from the delivery in 30 minutes, for me the coolest part is delivery to the back of your garden. You can get secure deliveries, even while not at home. That's great.
It's easier to make a drone that can drop off packages (which are loaded by some special process at the warehouse) than it is to make a drone that can pick up arbitrary-sized packages from a garden.
Sure, but the incentive is there once you start dropping valuable goods. And drone technology is improving.
I guess you'll have a 2-3 year secure-delivery-to-your-garden window.
Build a drone that tracks other drones going out of the Amazon warehouse, wait until parcel is dropped, and pick it up.
You could of course build a drone-police which shuts down all dark-drones. I hope the costs of such an infrastructure will be paid by taxes on drone delivery (or by increased price in drone delivery), and that society at large is not left covering the cost of such nonsense.
Whether it is worth stealing depends on several factors:
- is it worth it?
- will I get caught?
- am I a robber?
Stealing from the front of your house does not happen because most people are not robbers, and it is easy to get caught. Besides, you don't know what's inside, so you don't know if it's worth it.
A criminal operation with a dark-drone infrastructure is a different issue altogether:
- difficult to get caught, at least until we create structures to fight such operations
- it is organized by thieves - by definition
- it does not matter what you are stealing: once you have the dark-drones working, operating them is very cheap, so you can steal as much as you can, making the operations profitable.
It won't be cheap when your thief drones start to be shot down and it won't be safe when the police start to follow your drones back to your hiding place.
"Stealing from the front of your house does not happen because most people are not robbers"
I think that depends a great deal on where you live. Nice small town in the country where everyone knows each other, no problems, big city, no chance of it not being stolen.
Amazon packages are standardized and have a logo on them, which marks them. I am not saying it is not hard, but packages are by no means arbitrarily sized.
As a possible solution Amazon could offer secured dropoff boxes which can open and close using a password/key. The moment the package is delivered, the box is closed and secured.
For non prime packages, I live in Italy and a lot of stuff on Amazon catalogue is generally not available for next day delivery (which I use to time deliveries when I know the next day I work from home).
In Italy the express couriers are not allowed to leave stuff in your front yard, and it's generally not possible to schedule the first delivery attempt.