Living in the future continues to be really weird. It’s 2026, and we’ve got a lot of new high tech stuff, some of which is cool, entirely useful, and/or legitimately revolutionary. We can auto-translate menus and order carbon-plated super shoes using the 5G supercomputers in our pockets. GLP-1s have transformed the lives of millions and now there’s now an mRNA melanoma vaccine. And human civilization is clearly going to be both ruined and resurrected by artificial intelligence. But most of our other futuristic stuff, here in the actual future, is still pretty half-baked.

Sure, our AI chatbots can deepfake dead celebrities and detect AI-written Substack posts, but they also can’t stop themselves from hallucinating — or using em dashes — or, at present, figure out how to tell our cats apart. Self-driving robotaxis exist, but they are the goofiest-looking vehicles on the road and sometimes randomly convince themselves to swarm suburban cul-de-sacs. We aren’t living in a simulation, but we are living in a real-world beta test.

And while we still don’t have flying cars, Mars colonies, sonic showers, or androids who dream of electric sheep, we do have Amazon delivery drones that can somehow magically transport a bottle of sunscreen from a three million-square-foot distribution center to our doorstep in less than an hour. Or at least almost can.

On Monday in the Houston suburb of Richmond, a woman named Lindsey Austen received an alert that her Amazon package, containing an order of dry cat food and insoles for her daughter’s shoes, was about to be delivered to her home about 20 minutes after she ordered it.

It was arriving via Amazon’s Prime Air drone delivery service, which is now a same-day shipping option in parts of 11 cities across the country. You order your stuff, either tell the drone where you want your package dropped or not, and soon after, an Amazon worker loads your box into the cargo bay of an 80-pound Prime Air MK30 hexacopter, and off it flies to your house.

After getting her alert from Amazon, Austen heard a loud buzzing noise outside and rushed out to film her first-ever drone delivery with her phone.

“I was like, ‘Is the second coming of Jesus happening?’” she told Business Insider.

What happened next was no religious experience, but it did make for an instant-classic internet video:

@lindseyausten4 #foryou #drones #oops ♬ original sound - Get The Pick From My Profile🔥

#foryou #drones #oops

After Austen stopped recording, she quickly retrieved the wet package and found the contents undamaged. She later uploaded the video to TikTok and it went viral, as it should have: it’s addictively rewatchable, not just because it’s hilarious, but because it offers a vivid glimpse of what this surreal new technology is actually like in real life.

These delivery drones are about to be all over the country. Amazon announced Friday that the company expects Prime Air to “reach” nearly 500 cities and towns by the end of the year.........

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