Lab Notebook: Amazon drones for local marijuana delivery

The drone technology can potentially cut out the middleman from pot retail, now legal in Washington and Colorado. Moreover, in the future the entire process — from growing the plant to harvesting, packaging, and delivery — can be fully automated using Google robotics systems. :)

On a related topic, we can use banking problems of Colorado marijuana retailers to show the importance of Packaged Payload (Scalable Innovation, Chapter 2). According to Huffington Post (Jan 3, 2014),

Owners in the city expressed concern about taking in large amount of cash, since federal banking regulations currently prohibit banks from working with the marijuana industry while the drug remains classified as illegal by the federal government.

In System terms, cash is a physical "mass" type of Packaged Payload; its handling requires a complex set of procedures to control the transfer. The entire system is not scalable because it is subject to a trade-off between the amount of cash to handle and system security costs. That is, the more cash is available in the system, the more expensive security procedures have to become. By contrast, electronic bank money is an information type of Packaged Payload. The change in PP type breaks the trade-off and allows for unlimited, nearly costless money transfers.

tags: trade-off, packaged, payload, example, control, system, deontic, innovation, scalability