Amazon's Scout is cute but it won't bring humans and robots closer

With the introduction of its latest delivery drone iteration, the Scout, Amazon is once again reassuring the shopping public that automated package delivery services are just just around the corner. Just as they've been promising since 2013, when founder Jeff Bezos went on 60 Minutes and claimed that the technology would be commonplace within 5 years. But unfortunately for his predictions, the march of progress rarely sticks to a set schedule. Over the past half decade, a litany of companies worldwide have sought to build and deploy dozens of drone-based delivery services, with varying degrees of success. Last May, Ele.me, Alibaba's online meal ordering service, began using drones in Jinshan Industrial Park to get meals to mouths in just 20 minutes, a fraction of the time it'd take a human courier to drive through Shanghai traffic.