I. Setting the Stage

Sometimes in life you have to read between the lines. Like our intelligence officer brethren, we look to tradecraft tactics to determine where things are headed with tech.

For example, drug czars have to pretend to live everyday lives in normal apartments and without the fancy accoutrement of the rich. But if they lock themselves into a compound, where a man never leaves the house after months of surveillance while others come and go, it’s a pretty good chance you’ve got a high-value target in your line of sight.

Similarly, in tech circles, if you see a major global company doing “all the right things” around the edges of a certain technology, it’s highly likely that they’re using misdirection to keep the leaks, press, and corporate espionage at bay.

Amazon is working on a self-driving car. Period.

As they say, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Lets review the facts.

II. Self-Driving Facts

How about we start with the latest news. Amazon has positioned their future smart retail stores as using self-driving technologies. Every news organization reporting on it uses that language. Here’s a screenshot of the “amazon self-driving car” Google search:

As you can see there have been a few rumors but nobody is really talking about it. Amazon is investing in mapping technology, obviously in the machine learning software, and the sensors.

In December 2016, Amazon made its first delivery using a self-driving drone. It’s fully autonomous without human intervention.

As you can see Amazon is also involved in hardware. Now they typically outsource that. Amazon isn’t going to become a manufacturer of physical materials anytime soon. But they’ll darn sure slap their logo on commodity stuff out of China.

There’s also been a report that they’re talking to auto manufacturers to build their cars. Like Fiat. It’s a funny trend. Google is getting out of building their own cars. So is Apple. Amazon never even considered it.

Finally, CES was pretty much Amazon Alexa’s voice assistant being included into all sorts of products, mostly integrating with car’s infotainment systems. Namely because voice commands in cars are abysmal. Like touch screens before the iPhone came out. Instead of the problem being not registering a tap or chunk-chunk scrolling, with voice it’s about not having to enunciate to a ridiculous degree and repeating yourself.

III. Code Word: Amazon Borg

What is the ultimate strategy? We first have to start with the Car Operating System opportunity previously written. Much like Microsoft owned the relationship with people on Windows and Apple owned the relationship with people on iPhones, the question will be who wins the relationship with people in cars.

With Tesla hiring the inventor of Swift (the new Apple programming language for iOS devices) and putting him on the car software, my gut says Tesla is going to continue to invest in a closed ecosystem.

The 800-pound gorilla is Blackberry QNX which is pretty much the standard for separating the infotainment and secure parts of the car’s operating system. But otherwise most people are using Robot Operating System, an open-source OS for robotics and cars.

Many in the industry are also investing in the V2V and V2X technologies. A funny acronym that just means vehicle-to-vehicle communication. All that sensor data, mapping data, and deep learning algos that one car is learning on the road is also shared with other cars on the road in real-time. Let’s be clear that it’s not updating the intelligence algorithm on the fly, but rather some of the data surrounding that core software.

Looking at all of this through the lens of Hollywood gives us an apt analogy to help understand all of this: Star Trek’s Borg. It was an AI-controlled collective consciousness that made faster decisions, better. It’s the groupthink that the rest of the industry mostly shares.