The size of these vehicles is certainly absurd, but flying packages with drones that consume most of their energy to fight gravity does not seem particularly efficient either, (e.g. compared to small road electric vehicles with the same payload, which would have its own practical problems).
Sure but there's a tradeoff with ground transport. A drone can make the trip with much shorter traveled distance and potentially higher speed, resulting in higher utilization per vehicle. It also doesn't interfere with road traffic, which could have externalities in longer idle time for other vehicles at intersections and whatnot.
Both are better than Garret in his 2007 Ford Explorer driving around town all day delivering timbits and tacos.
A van can hold thousands of 2-ounce packages, whereas a drone can hold one. If you look at it in terms of a one-package utilization rate, a van has over 100% rate, because it holds multiple packages, in fact it may have over a 1000% utilization rate using that metric.
You're essentially wasting tons of energy and resources getting very small packages delivered faster, but in urban setting there are no efficiencies here, quite the contrary.
I just hope my DoorDash order is not sandwich #9,836...
A locomotive would be even more efficient over long distances, carrying 200,000,000 such packages. A containership even more so, carrying more than 20x the capacity of a big freight train, though I don't think they have the draft to fit up the drainage ditch behind my house. Nor do I have rails.
I jest, but the long tail is a real problem with such efficiency calculations.
You're right that it's never going to make sense to have migrating swarms of drones flying above the interstate carrying packages cross-country, but are real efficiencies here at the individual level:
This is why I don't feel bad ordering smaller items from Amazon when I could drive across town and get it myself.
But Uber eats and DoorDash are a reality, and I would pay someone to pick something up for me from Home Depot within the next hour. Services like Zipline have the potential to help out there.
>This is why I don't feel bad ordering smaller items from Amazon when I could drive across town and get it myself.
I've long thought this. UPS isn't driving from the hub to my house to deliver a package, 90% of the incremental driving distance is the length of my driveway.
>>A van can hold thousands of 2-ounce packages, whereas a drone can hold one.
In a perfect world, yes. In reality, no. You would need a perfect storm of a huge wave of orders all to the same restaurant (or cluster of restaurants) to be delivered to the same neighborhood to ensure timely delivery so the food was hot and the customers were happy. In real life, you are almost guaranteed to never hit the ideal conditions.
Edit: After re-reading your comment, I’d agree with you for the non-food deliveries. My comment was obviously focused more on the UberEats use case.
Clear example: Hospitals have helicopters, but most patients are still moved using vans. The helicopter is faster (when patient's life is acutely ending), but prohibitively expensive to utilize for every patient.
That example doesn't quite hold up. A helicopter is roughly the same size and weight as an ambulance and needs to transport a whole bunch of equipment. If we could get a Zipline drone to drive on the street, it would be vastly more efficient than its airborne brethren, but our infrastructure isn't set up for that.
You've got the answer, but just to point the problem with your comment from another point of view...
No, last mile delivery is made package by package. If you place 100 packages in a van and go delivering them, you will make 100 mostly independent trips, just carrying all the packages at once.
That's why those are very often done by motorcycle.
But indeed there is often a highly correlated trip segment. The Amazon's model of running a van into your neighborhood and distributing things there by drones may make sense. It doesn't make sense for Uber Eats business model, but it makes sense for Amazon.
> I was raised to consider ordering takeout in truly awful weather as pretty rude.
What’s more rude? Ordering takeout in bad weather, or not ordering takeout and indirectly punishing the delivery driver’s livelihood whenever the weather is bad..?
The existence of migratory birds proves that the loss of energy due to the Earth's gravitational pull is not so catastrophic. A vehicle in motion also loses energy because of the friction of the wheels. Above a certain speed, air friction becomes the most significant loss. The comparison of the energy balance of a vehicle on the road compared with a vehicle in the air is not as clear-cut. Vehicles on wheels are much heavier and require infrastructure (roads) that must be taken into account.
Lots of CGI and notices about "simulated" though. The videos that appear to maybe be real show something that does have wings, but looks too small/light/thin to carry much around.
Came here to say that (i think their operations in Africa are quite impressive) but it seems as their "Zips" are a different kind of breed and more like a drone than a plane.
If you were to ask a migratory bird, they'd tell you that it's fairly tough. You have to put on enough subcutaneous fat to double your body weight, and then do it knowing that either you or some of your friends and family will die.
The actual harm from the drone's wasted energy is pretty negligible aside from the waste heat itself, though, as compared to the many, many side effects of road vehicles of any kind (for example, just starting with the air pollution from tire particles).
Of course, that equation changes a bit once there are enough drones that noise pollution and collisions or other incidents become a real issue.
Noise pollution and collisions are a much, much larger problem with cars, since they're constrained to two dimensions while drones can use three. Plus, cars tend to kill people when they collide with each other (or with pedestrians), and drones would not. Hopefully they will all use engineered quiet propellers (such as Zipline uses) and electric engines (similarly).
People are ingenious at getting killed, and birds can do it so eventually if we have enough drones someone will die to one.
However, much mini deliveries could be done with vehicles smaller than a full size car - and places where it is common you see lots of mopeds and similar.
It seems like a drone falling out of the sky could still kill people. It just seems less likely to us because there aren't as many right now to worry about like cars.
I like these devices for use for medical supplies but do worry how polluted the skies could become when multiple companies are flying these things for standard packages.
They've been working on those things in Tallinn for years, and I've only ever seen them operate in a very limited area, and even then it's not unusual to see them seemingly stuck at the nearby rail crossing. Meanwhile a human on a Bolt scooter ate their and their investor's lunch IMO.
They do look cute, I remember being completely taken-aback the first time I saw one in the wild - I had to resist the temptation to stand in front of it, to see what would happen.
Though I did wonder how they'll cope in winter-weather. I can't imagine they'd do so well on snow/ice.
But there are plenty of places that don't have much snow and ice where they should be perfectly practical. Ice shouldn't be a problem, they could swap to studded tyres in the winter just like we do for cars here in Norway. Snow would be a much bigger problem though I agree!
I'd encourage you to stand in front of it. Commercializing public walkways like this is fine, I guess, but as a human walking around for non-commercial reasons, I feel like you have the right to do whatever you want (within reason) that doesn't impact other humans.
Aircraft are more energy efficient then cars[1] at scale. But even a light plane like a Cessna 172 does 13L/100KM[2] depending on flight speed. Certainly more then my Prius, but it can take a much more direct route too.
There's also the simple practical issue: self-driving cars can't navigate a complex crowded environment, whereas self-flying planes navigate a much simpler environment with many more regulatory controls on behavior.
I lost confidence at the very beginning of the article:
> In fact, unless you drive a car that gets 33.8 gallons per mile (or carry more than one passenger), new airplanes coming off the assembly line are more fuel-efficient
Cars typically get about 0.03 gallons per mile, so it’s not even close.
What is a drone to you? If you are only thinking about multicopters when you hear that word then yes, those are not efficient and probably never will be.
But the term commonly refers to all unmanned aerial vehicles.
For example a Global Hawk unmanned aircraft can fly 14,000 nautical miles and remain aloft for 42 hours. They are by definition very efficient. That is a drone.
On the other end of the spectrum The Spirit of Butts' Farm crossed the atlantic with 118 US fluid ounces (3.5 L) of fuel. It was flying for ~39 hour and 1,881.6 mi (3,028.1 km). That is about 2045 mile per gallon if I count it right. That is very efficient, and of course since the aircraft was unmanned it is a drone.
> For example a Global Hawk unmanned aircraft can fly 14,000 nautical miles and remain aloft for 42 hours. They are by definition very efficient. That is a drone.
Wow - this is what they are planning to use to deliver packages?
Nice thing about drones is they're unlikely to kill anyone if they crash, and they're not sharing the roads with cars in the first place.
In some places, bikes are first-class citizens of the road, but in other places they're very much not respected and riding one is tantamount to suicide. Every single cyclist I know, when they meet another cyclist, immediately asks about gnarliest injuries and they compare scars like dogs sniffing each other's butts. And in the past 20 years I've lost more friends to cycling fatalities than any other cause of death.
Only on places where they concentrate. It's not really flying that is difficult, it's approach and take-off, because they have to go through all of the heights.
Anyway, I guess the main problem is that most people will not want a sky full of drones just so that some random Joes can get their stuff from Amazon or AliExpress a little sooner.
Couldn't that be said about humans? As I understand it, once upon a time in some parts of the world, walking alone unarmed could get you abducted and sold into slavery. But then we decided as a society that we want to have this "Human Rights" thing and now most of us feel relatively safe about other people on the street not randomly abducting or assaulting us.
So I'm just not getting the argument for why we can't trust humans to not vandalize or steal robots, especially internet-connected ones that constantly film their surroundings. I for one believe that just like we can learn to be civil to one another, and can also extend our civility to other species (e.g. we generally don't go around kicking dogs we see on the street), we can also be civil to robots.
Somewhere like Japan, with a strong cultural sense of societal cohesion and obligation, it could work.
But I live in a country where "societal cohesion" and "obligations" are considered communist propaganda and our constitution gives us the right to as many guns as we want in case we decide to hunt the government for sport.
I mean, this robot[0] make it all the way across the Netherlands and Germany, and only 300 miles into the US before getting beheaded.
This might be news to some people, but there are other modes of transportation / delivery than 2-ton cars. "2-ton cars vs. flying drones" is a false dichotomy.
This is a policy problem, not a tech problem. People need to be paid a living wage, period. The lack of this and the subsidizing of delivery fees by VC money has led people to believe it's somehow sustainable to sit on your lazy ass, order food and have it delivered within 30 min for next to nothing. Or maybe people know that it's not sustainable but just don't give a shit. Greedy corporations and unethical people will always exists, that's why we need better laws.
I'd say it IS a tech problem as much as it is a policy problem. Technology historically has allowed humanity to develop society in a way that constantly minimises risk, reduces "hard labour" tasks, and delegates repetitive "brainless" work to computers. Only with technology could these policies come into fruition. Otherwise, we would be effectively shutting down industries completely, and as far as I am aware this rarely if ever happens.
I do believe minimum wage should be set at the local living wage standard, and that companies like Uber are exploiting their workers through weak labour laws, but unless the market is much more tightly controlled, in a somewhat-free market (which is most of the world) economy, it is a tech issue.
It is absolutely a policy problem because technology doesn't come out of nowhere, is not free for everyone to use, and not anyone benefits the same way.
Automating all work, sure. Removing people's mean of subsistance (a wage) and keeping the money for yourself, no. In a capitalistic society, technology only helps people if capitalists give away the product of (automated) labour, and that is not what is happening.
If we want to optimize economic growth with the most powerful force in the universe, compound interest, shouldn't we pay people the market rate which is usually some combination of the scarcity of labor and the economic value of that labor?
If this rate is too low, then that is what the welfare system is for. Forcing employers to pay a "living wage" for jobs that don't generate a "living wage's" economic value simply retards the economy and robs our children of a wealthier future.
> This is a policy problem, not a tech problem. People need to be paid a living wage, period
false. no one is forcing these people from taking those jobs (uber eats, grub hub, etc) at the agreed upon wages. tell me how somehow it would be better for those folks if these jobs didn't exist at all given that unemployment in the USA is incredibly low.
Creating a regulatory environment in which a large fraction of the population end up on wages that don’t sustain a reasonable standard of living is a problem for everyone, not just those experiencing low wages.
from a utilitarian perspective we could easily be better off as a society taxing tech bros enough to pay them UBI rather than doing food deliveries on serf wages.
Or the even more efficient and eco-friendly "make and bring your own lunch", but somehow this isn't considered, instead it's a long thread of drones vs cars vs mopeds and low-wage delivery people.
I don’t even really
Live in a rural area and there may be a few fast food options but there’s nothing I’d want delivered. There are things I can go out and pickup in 15 minutes or throw together at home that I’d rather do.
In general barring difficulty in leaving the house food delivery seems awfully optional.
Agreed. Something I commonly observe, which I’m guilty of too, is getting so excited about technological innovation that we can’t see the forest for the trees. I get that the idea of being able to order a sub sandwich on a whim and have it delivered directly to you via a drone is really cool, but why not plan ahead and bring it with you? One could also go to a sandwich shop next to where they work. My coworkers and I would walk to the sandwich shop next to our office once per week when I still worked in an office. Seems remarkably less wasteful and more efficient all around.
I don’t see it ever happening, but I’m not even sure we need package delivery available for anything every day of the week. If we limited it to once per week for bulkier items (such as large furniture), we could reduce a lot of waste and traffic. Rather than deliver tiny lunches via drone, perhaps we should reconsider the greater idea of ordering objects. As someone without a car in a car-dependent city, it’s certainly on my mind.
And this doesn’t expand into societal implications of ordering everything without interacting with other humans. That’s perhaps a more interesting conversation!
And I live in such a lovely city. I can bike anywhere so quickly, so easily. Scooters & micromobility are abundant. But so many people (so many roommates over time) make a habit of ordering delivery, on such a regular basis. It's unfathomable to me: both the negative impact in general, and particularly here where it's so close & pleasant to go walk or bike around. It's such a huge expense to the world, and such a great enriching activity, getting a little walkabout.
Not everyone bikes or uses scooters. I don't. But, if I'm in a city, I'll certainly walk someplace rather than getting a food delivery which I haven't had since... I really couldn't tell you when.
When I was in the city, I'd order delivery from the restaurants on our street. The waiter would just walk up, and hand the food to me.
Delivery apps just made people get food from a larger variety of places. Before them, you'd order from the pizzaria that's on the route home, and pick up up before jumping back on the subway. Or you'd eat at the diner on your block.
Speaking as someone who just goes downstairs and makes a sandwich, or who takes some to work, ordering lunch seems absurd to me. Is it that cheap in the US / do you earn that much? Food culture is so weird over there.
It's not cheap. When I still worked in the city, I was always blown away by how much of their salary most of my coworkers were willing to spend on restaurant lunches every day.
Typically I would expect a restaurant lunch in a major city in the US to cost $20-$40 per person after taxes and tip.[1] So, essentially $5,000 - $10,000/year. This was for people with salaries running from about $50,000 - $200,000 before income tax, so something like 7% - 20% of their after-tax income.
Making a lunch and bringing it instead should be less than half of that, especially if one makes extra food for dinner and brings the leftovers for lunch the next day, but I guess a lot of people actively dislike cooking for themselves.
A decent amount of tech workers also get dinner at restaurants nearly every day, which is of course even more expensive.
[1] Excluding inexpensive franchises like McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, because my coworkers typically did not get lunch at places like that.
I see a dichotomy... many colleagues bring lunches to work in e.g. glass microwaveable containers, but many have an "ick" abt prepping their own food. A huge "tax" on the lazy.
According to zipline[1] it is still better than motorcycles at least. Considering we are talking about 100km, I would not consider a bicycle an option for such small packages.
That said for me delivering a package by bicycle+ train + bycycle is an option but it will always be more expensive unless you can stand long delivery times.
At least a delivery vehicle is amortizing by delivering multiple lunches to multiple people in a single trip. When someone drives themselves to lunch, they’re using a 2-ton vehicle for a single lunch.
Delivery vehicles for packages aren’t traveling very far between stops. A 2 ton vehicle dropping off 200 packages on a 100 mile delivery route is averaging 0.5 miles per package and 0.125 kWh where a drone might need to fly 15 miles each way per packages = 30 miles to and from some central hub to do those same routes. Drones are light, but 0.125 kWh to fly 30 miles seems unlikely.
Food delivery might be a better comparison, but 2 pizzas and a 2 liter soda is heavy enough to need a fairly massive drone.
The drone would still be the better option. Electric motors and propellers don't produce any pollution, unlike combustion engines and/or car tyres.
And of course the obvious part where it removes hundreds of thousands of vans from already massively congested road traffic. The skies remain mostly unused.
Drones aren’t necessarily electric, and cars can be EV so that doesn’t favor one over the other.
Pollution wise you need to consider the lifecycle of a drone which is likely far worse than a van. Many drones are using very dirty small internal combustion engines. Safety wise replacing 1 van with 30+ heavy drones each traveling far more could easily favor the van.
Any solution that isn't a stopgap is necessarily electric given climate change, and while EVs do reduce CO2 emissions they increase particle emissions from heavy tyre use by 20% (given their massive weight), which is arguably even worse for residential use. Anything that is in contact with the ground will produce some kind of particle pollution.
The extremely limited flight times and weather conditions you get from electric drones means large scale drone deployments will likely require small internal combustion engines and all the associated pollution from that. Some hybrid approaches where a land vehicle uses fully electric drones for drop off have been prototyped, but they don’t reduce tire ware.
Longer term it’s more debatable but we hand waving delivery drones as completely pollution free when we don’t know what from they would actually take is simply wishful thinking.
Just search "drone engine" or "UAV engine", there are tons of fuel-powered engines (many optimized for JP-8 since the military likes to be single-fuel) made for planes of various sizes.
The larger ones tend to have an electric generator to power the control surfaces, smaller drones tend to carry a battery for that and use the engine solely for forward propulsion.
This is for fixed-wing only, so it would apply to Zipline P1 but not P2, by the way. There have been some engine-over-electric setups to run multirotors from a single powerplant, but it's generally awful. It may or may not work for hybrid architectures like a quadplane, or a single-engine-VTOL like a tailsitter, all these things are in active development.
Single meal delivery as an institution is wildly inefficient. The absurd inefficiency of the car as delivery vehicle does not make drones a meaningfully wiser choice.
For every proposed technology, we need desperately to ask: does this really make ecological sense?
Delivering necessities (e.g. medicine) to a remote township with a drone makes sense. Drone-drop pizzas do not.
That's because it is absurd. The same way any convenience is absurd.
Most of the deliveries around the world are done by motorbikes though, not only that but they are done not one at a time but in big chunks. Which is not absurd and pretty good.
Quick tangential question: I watched a few seconds that video and was immediately struck by how Mark sounds so....YouTube'ey? What is it about his intonation and narration style that is so distinctly YouTube? I don't watch enough YouTube to get a sense for whether it's distinct to him or to an entire class of popular channels. Every sentence or two is a "quip" - it's loud and sing-song'y. Lots of phrases seem to end on a rising tone (my parents used to call this "upspeak?" because it sounds like you're asking a question? all the time?).
TLDR: They use various ways of emphasizing words and adding variety to speech. It's almost exclusively done in videos where it's just a face talking to camera to try to make it attention grabbing.
They use Jon Stewart's Daily Show as a pre- YouTube example of someone using the same techniques for the same reasons.
Interesting thanks for the link. I was a college radio dj and there is a similar thing for when people are speaking on-air. It's kind of strange to be in a basement alone talking into a mic, especially because people are listening!
Makes me think of sports broadcasting mannerisms across different cultures/languages.
This is an interesting observation. I had a similar observation about tik tok influencer speak, though it’s not the same style as YouTube speak. There is a distinct shared way of speaking I’ve just called the tik tok accent (not talking about the AI voiceover). It’s something I’ve noticed mostly with female influencers, where they talk in a lower, quieter voice, that feels both like they are educating as well as perhaps infantilizing the listener. It’s difficult to describe precisely but definitely a shared phenomenon.
> I’ve noticed mostly with female influencers, where they talk in a lower, quieter voice, that feels both like they are educating as well as perhaps infantilizing the listener.
It’s called “patronizing.” These people think they are more interesting and intelligent than they actually are and take on this air of pretentious lecturing.
It's awful. I was impressed by the video and the technology, but the presentation style is irritating.
I felt especially sorry for the people working at the Rwanda site just trying to do their jobs efficiently, while he mucks about being fake-excited about everything. There's almost an air of "smile and nod and hope he goes away soon" about it
> I cut my finger making lunch?
So I placed an order for some bandaids a couple minutes ago?
And now they're four seconds away!
That is a nearly silent drone system that can deliver a package from the sky?
Right to my backyard in as little as two minutes?
With dinner plate accuracy!
Where else do people talk like this? What motivates this kind of speech?
Viewer retention, remember when you were taught to make an interesting intro to an essay to grab the reader? This is just that in video form, to really succeed in getting to the front page/trending of Youtube you really have to grab randos who aren't necessarily coming to you for your content so it has to have an attention grabbing start.
You can ask ChatGPT to make it 500 words intro. It will sound natural, just like, how you talk with your friends. People don't want to wait for someone talking something 5 minutes then realize that it's not the video they want to watch.
The idea is that you want to say everything about the video within 10/15 seconds to make viewer interested.
Just like how you want that the title of HN story must be under 80 character, not 800. Do you start conversation with someone by saying 80 words then go on for 30 minute?
My totally made up backstory for why this is is from bad editing in the early days of chopping up multiple takes where the edit does not happen on natural sentence endings so those intonations happen at unnatural places. it then became a thing and now is done in normal delivery as a style to be emulated.
Oh, around 2010 youtube (peak vlogger era) the cool thing to do in monologues was removing pauses between sentences, making a sort of galloping cadence.
Can’t say for sure where it comes from. But upspeak and it’s tangential culture does more psychic damage to me than advertising, “bad ux”, dubious business models, and most of the other common gripes on here
Mark Rober is one of the big-name youtubers that so many other youtubers try to emulate, so whatever his reasons are, the reason it sounds so "youtubey" is probably because it's how Mark Rober talks in his videos.
Essentially its a learned affectation to come off as approachable and unthreatening (see also Jimmy Fallon) to garner views. Read a "boring" technical article at Ars or watch this guy fumble around and be silly and give these practiced big smiles? A lot of people would rather watch a 20-30 minute video that's entertaining and lower information than read a 5 minute article thats denser.
Essentially this is blogspam in video form and it makes a lot of people very wealthy, so its not going away anytime soon.
As someone who loves the arts, but can't get into youtube personality culture, its just so crazy to me people watch these things. They're a bit infantlizing to me. "Oh you want to learn about these drones? Instead of proper sources here's some guy who will pretend to be your friend and do silly comedic things for you while explaining it to you on the 5th grade level." Umm ok.
The most positive thing I can say is that there are people out there who can't read well (or read English at all) or can't learn from reading well, so these videos can be seen as helping a vulnerable demographic in an accessibility-like way. It may also attract younger people who otherwise would never read an Ars or Hackaday or HN (or whomever) article because these outlets are just not super accessible to them (unknown site to them, written on a too low level, etc). And that these video personalities could be a stepping stone into better and deeper media.
Essentially media is a free capitalist market and people choose their media sources, via their own biases and limitations. If they want everything explained to them via a Jimmy Fallon impersonator, then it will happen. Eventually the lowest common denominator demands questionable gimmicks and the market is more than happy to oblige.
Personally, as someone who does enjoy youtube but also relates to the grating nature of over "blogspammy" content, I think the key is I'm rarely if ever only watching a youtube video. Audiobooks/podcast when I can focus, youtube videos when I can't/doin something else. Can tune in and out easily and mostly not miss most stuff as I'm scrolling elsewhere.
Great analysis though, "blogspam" in video form is a fantastic metaphor for the over produced algo gamey vids. (Perfect length to hit max ads, thumbnail, title, intro template, etc)
> Instead of proper sources here's some guy who will pretend to be your friend and do silly comedic things for you while explaining it to you on the 5th grade level.
Well, Mark Rober's intended, primary audience (don't let youtube hear this) is 5th graders so I don't know what you expected.
They aren't trying to sell kiwico kits to 26 year olds you know.
That's fair but Rober does the standard "Youtube voice" and persona popular in many demographics. I don't think its fair to say this is something unique to 5th grader audience YT's. This is practiced persona that leads to social media success in many venues.
Also HN isnt a 5th grader's venue, so its interesting how normalized it is posting children's media in adult spaces, probably because he doesn't come off as much more childish than most YT personalities.
that's not bad, upspeak is a great way to label the phonetic dancing being done. For that guy he always talks like that, something in the strong direction of salesman like. Sometimes you can go far back enough in the video history to sample their persona developing over time, eg ChrisFix videos on YouTube have undergone a more muted and normal speech pattern to the more ebullient stuff you find later.
I think the style arose out of a need to fill a 1-minute video targeted at an audience of low attention-span 13 year olds with 9 additional minutes of CONTENT! in order to meet the length requirement for monetization. If the filler CONTENT! is bombastic and sing-songey, it keeps your attention, however vapid it may be.
Also noteworthy is that Rober is a really good looking former engineer/technician. Most men I've known in the field do not have such as mediagenic appearance, but he is attractive enough that people accept him as a presenter.
I mean, the part where it's pure electric is what strikes me as a significant for other applications: this is an adaptation in logistics that can be rolled out independent of people's personal transport preferences.
Every bit of volume pretty directly can knock some ICE usage off the road, and more importantly because batteries are integral to the process it's pretty amenable to be running purely on renewables.
That's a hell of "technology which can just plain make everything better" possibility.
I guess for me the difference is that one is only now being tested in the USA. And even if successful, it will take forever to come here in Germany, especially in any place but Berlin/Hamburg/Munich.
Completely agree; he should have led the video with the medical drones. When it was recommended by the algorithm, I watched a few seconds and then closed it—Okay, another drone delivery company... But then someone personally recommended I watch it so I gave it another chance and loved the Rwandan section!
Seems absurd when it's put like that. This is possibly something we'll look back on and struggle to comprehend how it was ever the go-to solution.