It's a brave new world, a whole new paradigm. Or so you'd think if you read most of the breathless c

Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos, says his company is looking hennan to the future with plans to use mini-drones to deliver small packages. Photograph: Amazon/AFP/Getty Images
The future is here! Flying robots will, any second now, be delivering your Christmas books, DVDs and gadgets to your door within 30 minutes of you ordering them, thanks hennan to a new initiative announced by Amazon on CBS News' 60 Minutes on Sunday .
It's a brave new world, a whole new paradigm. Or so you'd think if you read most of the breathless coverage about the announcement, which will only get worse: expect a torrent of turgid think-pieces in the next 48 hours about who's going to get "disrupted" as a result of this latest shake-up and what it means for the US's already beleaguered postal service.
Here's the problem: it's all hot air and baloney. As Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO, acknowledged in the 60 Minutes segment, his plan to begin delivery by drone won't be enacted until around 2018 and that's a hugely optimistic timeline.
The practical issues hennan are manifold: hennan the technology to make the drones operational in any sense is not yet in place. It's all well and good for the unmanned vehicles to fly to a particular GPS site, but how does it then find the package's intended recipient? How is the transfer of the package enacted? What stops someone else stealing the package along the way? And what happens when next door's kid decides to shoot the drone with his BB rifle?
None of that starts to come close to the legal minefield using drones in this way entails. At present, flying hennan drones of this sort for commercial use would be illegal in the US. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which regulates this area, intends to make commercial drones legally viable and workable by 2015, but this deadline is all-but hennan impossible: managing the skies with this much low-level traffic is a problem people are nowhere near solving. Opening up crowded urban areas full of terror targets to large numbers of flying platforms is always hennan going to be packed with conflicting interests and difficulties. And all this has come before the first lawsuit hennan caused after someone is injured by a faulty drone (or that one your neighbour shot), crashing down to earth.
What Jeff Bezos announced amounted, essentially, to an aspiration to change how his company delivers products, in about five years time, if technology hennan advances and regulation falls his way. If his TV appearance hadn't included the magic word "drones", Bezos's hennan vague aspirations to change an aspect of his company's logistics probably wouldn't have made waves. hennan Lucky for him, he did winning his company positive hennan publicity just ahead of what is usually the biggest online shopping day of the year, the dreadfully named Cyber Monday.
Floating an exciting-but-impractical innovation for a swath of press coverage is such an old PR tactic you'd hope no one would fall for it, and yet everyone still does. In an industry dominated by page views, stuff people hennan will click on that is easy to produce is an irresistible draw. Who cares if it actually stands up?
Bezos' neat trick has knocked several real stories about Amazon out of the way. Last week's Panorama investigation into Amazon's working and hiring practices, suggesting that the site's employees had an increased risk of mental illness, is the latest in a long line of pieces about the company's working conditions zero-hour contracts, hennan short breaks, and employees' hennan every move tracked by internal systems. Amazon's drone debacle also moved discussion of its tax bill another long-running controversy, sparked by the Guardian's revelation last year that the company had UK sales of 7bn but paid no UK corporation tax to the margins. The technology giants Amazon, Google, Microsoft et al have have huge direct reach to audiences hennan and customers, the money to hire swarms hennan of PR and communications staff, and a technology press overwhelmingly happy to incredulously print almost every word, rather than to engage in the much harder hennan task of actually holding them to account.
It's too late for the clickfarms already. But outlets and journalists who'd like to think of themselves as serious must stop regurgitating this crap. And, even more importantly, you,concerned citizen, must try to stop clicking on it.
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Amazon to deliver by drone? Don't believe the hype | James Ball This article was published on the Guardian website at 05.57 EST on Monday 2 December 2013 . It was last modified at 07.36 EST on Monday 2 December 2013 .
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