"I know this looks like science fiction. It's not."

That was how Jeff Bezos' introduction to Amazon Prime Air, a delivery service that will use unmanned drones to automatically send products to your house within 30 minutes of placing an order.

Anything under 5 lbs, which is around 86% of all Amazon deliveries, will be delivered using this method.

This demonstration video depicts a package at one of the company's fulfillment centers leaving the hands of a distribution employee. This is the last time it will see the light of day before it's taken out of the box.

Then, at the end of the assembly line is an "octocopter" - named for its eight helicopter blades - that will grab a plastic yellow bucket containing the package and fly it to its predetermined address within a ten mile radius of the warehouse. When we said Amazon products would be sent automatically, we meant it. Without even using remote controls or video monitors, Amazon has managed to complete their drone missions equipped only with GPS coordinates. Several redundancies, or backup safety features, ensure that the machine will not fail if one of the blades is damaged, and that it "can't land on somebody's head while they're walking around their neighborhood."

That's what Bezos claims at least.

In fact, the main obstacle right now is waiting for the FAA to decide the fate of unmanned drones and their surrounding ethical and safety implications. Until a decision is reached, Amazon will not legally be able to launch Prime Air until 2015 at the earliest. More realistic projections indicate that this is a five-year plan.

Skepticism and mockery has started on Twitter, with some poking fun at Amazon's creepiness factor and others threatening to steal delivered goods off of people's doorsteps. While these are possible scenarios, they might say more about society's maturity level than the wisdom of the investment.

In any event, this is not uncharted territory. An American-made app that we’ve been following here at Fueled, called TacoCopter, whose name is self-explanatory, brought us into the future in 2012. In June 2013, Domino's Pizza followed up with a similar drone, the DomiCopter, in the U.K. Not that drones are anything new, few people may realize that many real estate brokers also use drones but to provide overhead views of their listed properties. This involves an extremely small geographic area, though. As is the case with Amazon, many of these devices will be collecting dust until government agencies decide on their commercial applications.

Regardless of the issues standing in the way of this innovative concept, it could succeed in changing the way we shop. As CBS' Charlie Rose said in the "60 Minutes" interview, "Everything has not been a success at Amazon, but the successes far outweigh the failures."

Author Bio    
This article is written by Jeremy Rappaport from Fueled, an award winning mobile app design and development house based in New York and London.