AV

Warning Indicator

To succeed, self-driving cars need teams that can perfect the tech. Then, they need consumers willing to pay for autonomous services. Let’s take a pulse check. 

Supply

Self-driving divisions aren’t exempt from COVID-induced corporate belt-tightening. Last week, GM self-driving subsidiary Cruise laid off 8% of its workforce, reducing headcount across product, marketing, and rideshare teams. 

This week, Uber shuttered 45 offices, including its AI lab, and laid off another 3,000 employees, per the WSJ. The coronavirus has crimped Uber’s vision of becoming a mobility superapp, as the company focuses on ride-hailing and food delivery and sheds non-core businesses.

• Uber spent $457 million on tech R&D in 2018. Self-driving remains an expensive research project that could eventually provide a path to profitability. 
• The company’s self-driving venture was valued at $7.3 billion a year ago. Selling the unit or offloading some IP could give Uber more liquidity. 

Demand

Americans remain skeptical of self-driving cars, according to a new survey from Partners for Automated Vehicle Education (PAVE):

• Nearly three in four Americans say AV tech is “not ready for primetime.” 
• 20% think AVs will never be safe, while 58% think they’ll be safe in a decade.
• Only 18% would put their names on an AV waitlist.

Further complicating matters: Most AV go-to-market strategies involve shared mobility services. But half of U.S. consumers plan to stop using ride-hailing apps because of the coronavirus, per a recent IBM survey.

The road forward

• For companies: The self-driving industry will consolidate. The remaining players will continue R&D, testing, and commercial deployments. 
• For consumers: Car owners who have advanced driver assist (ADAS) features widely trust them, per PAVE. And most consumers say they’d trust AVs more if they could take a test ride. Trust also increases with education. 

New technology tends to be greeted with skepticism, especially when it’s deployed in a safety-critical scenario. In the near-future, expect more stories about AVs ferrying packages rather than people. After the coronavirus fades, consumer interest could improve as safe AV products and services go mainstream.

VR

Greener Virtual Pastures

VR can take a little victory lap on the haters, as a treat. 

Tomorrow, Facebook’s Oculus division rings in the one-year anniversary of launching Quest, its standalone headset, and the Rift S, its PC-powered gaming headset. Some updates, c/o Oculus: In under a year, Quest users spent over $100 million on content. More than 20 Quest titles have passed the $1 million revenue mark; over 10 have hit $2 million. 

• Quest may still be a niche consumer product, but the capable device is flying off the shelves. The headset was out of stock on Oculus’s storefront until yesterday. 

One year in, Oculus is releasing hand-tracking features for users to navigate VR settings without controllers. Oculus is also adding VR productivity apps Immersed and Spatial to its store. Could be handy for Twitter’s WFH forever employees.

Big picture: Facebook bought Oculus for $2 billion in 2014. While that big bet is starting to pay dividends, some analysts think the wider VR industry hasn’t fully seized on the quarantine opportunity.

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EVENT

Recap: COVID-19 and AI Adoption

Will your neighbor who makes her own olive oil eventually use AI to finish the task faster? And will a robot ever be capable of configuring and troubleshooting toilets? The answer is probably not, per Emerging Tech Brew’s Monday event. 

But the technology is encroaching on more aspects of daily life and business operations. The coronavirus is bending the curves of AI adoption, investment, and deployment. Futurist and Author Amy Webb, SoftBank Partner Giles Whiting, and I broke down: 

• How Big Tech is strengthening its competitive position in the AI ecosystem 
• New use cases for robots
• Where automation will strike hardest 
• Course corrections for data protection and surveillance 

We also touched on Big Tech moving into farming and agriculture, the forthcoming boom in home-based diagnostics, and how to future-proof your career, among other things.  

+ Find a .

BITS & BYTES

Stat: 31% of small and medium-sized businesses have stopped operating in the last three months, while 52% of personal businesses shut down, according to a new Facebook survey. To help bring them online, the company launched Shops, which allows businesses to create digital storefronts on FB and Instagram. 

Quote: “There is no such thing as a backdoor just for the good guys, and the American people do not have to choose between weakening encryption and effective investigations.”—Apple’s rejoinder to Attorney General William Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray. Encryption tensions between Big Tech and Washington are back. 

Read: Andreessen Horowitz posits the Crypto Price-Innovation Cycle. In short, a rise in bitcoin’s price → more interest in cryptocurrency → idea and code contributions flow into the ecosystem → new startups and projects form.

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WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• Microsoft Build continues on day two. I’ll cover top announcements from the developer conference on Friday. 
• TikTok has a new CEO: Kevin Mayer, the former Disney exec who launched Disney+. Mayer will also be COO of ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company. 
• Square, Jack Dorsey’s non-Twitter company, told employees they too can WFH forever if they’d like. 
• GM and LG Chem have started ground prep for the EV battery cell manufacturing plant in Lordstown, Ohio. 
• Google said it will not develop bespoke machine learning or AI algorithms “to facilitate upstream extraction in the oil and gas industry.”
• Tesla says it’s hiking the “Full Self-Driving” subscription by $1,000 in July to $8,000. For what it’s worth, FSD is a package of ADAS features, not a self-driving service.

SURPRISE

Tomorrow, we’re sending a one-time Thursday email with something special. This is a visual clue. Tune in for more. 

MARKET RESEARCH

Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot has a new use case—working as a shepherd. 

TECH THINGAMABOBS

For antitrust buffs: Fiona Scott Morton, Yale econ professor and former Justice Department chief economist, and David Dinielli, senior advisor with the beneficial technology team at Omidyar Network, wrote a 41-page roadmap for how the feds could charge Google with monopolizing the digital ad market. The DOJ and state attorneys general will likely make an antitrust case against Google soon, the WSJ reports. 

For wordsmiths: This Word Does Not Exist spits out nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, and definitions that are created by machine learning algorithms. Don’t use this tool in term papers or work correspondence.