Good Monday Morning! It’s May 10th. Happy belated Mothers’ Day 💐 to all the mamas — including mine! — reading SWIRL this morning! In honor of all the cool moms out there, I made a Mom Jeans playlist:
Let these sweet mom jams serenade you as you get into this week’s SWIRL:
📱 Tech: Tesla’s tumultuous week
📈 Business: A unicorn rises in Canada
🏛 Politics: FCC decision was flooded with fraud
If this is your first SWIRL, keep reading this part. If not, carry on to the content.
Welcome, new Swirlers! Here’s a brief reader guide: the three teasers above unfurl below to briefly cover a buzzy development in their respective area. You’ll read a little about each one. At the end, we pull on a common thread among all three and explore what it might mean for us. If you missed last week’s SWIRL, tuck in here.
📱 Tech: Tesla’s tumultuous week
That’s not the Bloomberg headline you want if you’re Elon Musk, especially if you’re a couple days away from appearing live 🎙 on SNL, but that’s the Bloomberg headline Elon Musk got.
A round of emails 📧 between California’s Department of Motor Vehicles and a Tesla engineer were the subject of Bloomberg reporting on Friday. But let’s back up 🔙 for a second. On New Year’s Day, Musk tweeted about his positive outlook for Tesla’s self-driving system:
In a recent internal memo, a DMV 🚙 executive wrote “Elon’s tweet does not match engineering reality per CJ.” The statement was based on March 2021 discussions between the DMV and CJ Moore, the Director of Autopilot Software at Tesla.
Over the last couple of months, Musk has continued to publicly suggest that the software in Tesla’s ⚡️ vehicles will achieve the ability to operate without a human driver this year, a position his top software engineer calls into question.
California’s DMV has a special interest 🧐 in these claims. Tesla has been testing a beta version of its ‘full-self driving’ software through a “Navigate on Autopilot on City Streets” program since October of last year. As of March of this year, there were 824 vehicles piloting the technology. Most of those vehicles are operating 🚘 in California, which explains why the state has been closely tracking Tesla’s efforts.
In the same timespan, several high-profile tragedies involving Tesla vehicles have made national news 🗞. Investigations into the deadly accidents have raised questions about the electric car company’s self-driving tech.
To help inform the public about the safety of its vehicles, Tesla releases a quarterly safety report 📊. The latest data appear to indicate that the Autopilot features can improve safety when properly used. Citing the report, Musk said in April “Tesla with Autopilot engaged now approaching 10 times lower chance of accident than average vehicle.”
However, the top autonomous driving official at California’s DMV, Miguel Acosta, recently wrote 📝 to one of the top lawyers at Tesla, imploring the automaker to…
“provide clear and effective communication to customers, buyers and the general public” about its Autopilot features, their capabilities and how they should be used.
“As Tesla is aware, the public’s misunderstanding about the limits of the technology and its misuse can have tragic consequences,” - Miguel Acosta, California DMV Autonomous Driving Branch Chief
📈 Business: A unicorn rises in Canada
Last Monday, we talked about a blockchain startup on its way to becoming a billion-dollar company. On Friday, another startup announced they just reached that milestone, officially making them a unicorn 🦄.
Ada, a Toronto-based tech firm, announced that its latest fundraising round lifted its total valuation above $1B💰. You’ve probably never heard of Ada, but there’s a good chance you’ve interacted with its products, or to be more specific, its robots 🤖.
The 6-year old company focuses on increasing the volume and quality of interactions between online consumers and online companies through chat robots, (AKA chatbots) which are computer-based customer service helpers. A recent Forbes piece dives deeper 🤓 on chatbots if you’re interested.
In the past, large companies have struggled with maintaining great customer service as they expand ↗️ their businesses. Ada wants to change that.
“We are revolutionizing the way brands interact with their customers at scale. We enable a new paradigm: the ability to speak to your customers more – not less – as you grow. We will use this new round of funding to accelerate our automation’s impact across every stage of the customer journey, and more than double our team size to 500+.” - Mark Murchison, Ada CEO & Co-founder
Ada’s current clients 🤝 include behemoths like Facebook, Zoom, Square, and Shopify. Safe to say they’re in good company. According to its website, the startup can help these companies answer 80% of customer inquiries without requiring a live customer-service representative to engage. That’s a lot of potential savings.
And that potential has kept investor interest high enough to push past a critical milestone in Ada’s journey 🛣 to becoming a multi-billion dollar business — and a possible future IPO.
🏛 Politics: FCC decision was flooded with fraud
The government’s focus 🔎 on internet access and big tech is a popular topic here at SWIRL 🌀, and this week’s story out of New York is full of drama.
There are several moving parts, so we’ll take them in pieces.
📰 The headline: On Thursday, New York’s Attorney General office released a report outlining how internet providers funded a secret 🤫 effort to manufacture fake public comments in the run-up to the FCC’s 2017 decision to repeal Net Neutrality (more on that in moments). From the press release:
Multi-Year Investigation Into 2017 Net Neutrality Rulemaking Finds 18 Million
Fake Comments Filed with FCC, Half a Million Fake Letters Sent to CongressBroadband Industry Funded Six Companies That Engaged in Illegal Activity and Impersonated Millions of Americans
🕰 Let’s time-hop:
2003: The term “net neutrality” is coined by Colombia law professor, Tim Wu, who makes the case in a scholarly paper that the internet should be regulated like a public utility
2015: The Obama administration implements net neutrality rules regulating internet companies, similar to how phone & electricity companies remain regulated today
2017: Then FCC Chairman, Ajit Pai — a Republican appointed by Obama, elevated to Chairman by Trump — led the commission to repeal the Obama era net neutrality rules after hearings & public commenting sessions
2021: Notably, Tim Wu is appointed to the Biden White House to take on big tech & competition; NY AG reveals that the majority of public comments received by FCC were faked by internet companies, which brings us back to today
🕵🏾♀️ The fraud: The AG’s office noted that 22 million public comments were included in the FCC’s review; 18 million were faked.
⚖️ The punishment: Three firms hired by internet companies were fined a total of $4M.
🗣 The FCC’s response:
“The public record should be a place for honest dialogue, but today’s report demonstrates how the record informing the FCC’s net neutrality repeal was flooded with fraud. This was troubling at the time because even then the widespread problems with the record were apparent,” FCC Acting Chair Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement Thursday. “We have to learn from these lessons and improve because the public deserves an open and fair opportunity to tell Washington what they think about the policies that affect their lives.”
🔮 The future: If you’re interested in hearing more about what’s happening with net neutrality today & moving forward, Senator Ed Markey will be joining Vox for a live event on Wednesday to discuss the topic.
See you there…unless you’re a fake person, in which case please don’t come.
So, how do our three stories swirl together? Our SWIRL last week weighed the tradeoffs consumers and citizens make for the sake of convenience. This week, we’re tackling Automation.
We hear a lot about automated intelligence/AI, automated driving, automated answering services, the automation of jobs…it’s seemingly everywhere. This week’s SWIRL 🌀 rotates around three automation stories.
🚗 Tesla’s automated driving technology
🤖 Ada’s automated chatbot products
💬 FCC’s vulnerability to automated public opinion
🚗 Tesla
We love that technology is advancing towards a future where cars could operate without drivers. While we still don’t know what that looks like, we do know that we could re-purpose a lot of time if we weren’t stuck behind the wheel. Time = money. What’s at stake? Safety — for now, self-driving technology isn’t safe enough to widely deploy & it’ll be a long road ahead to build the needed trust with governments and individuals.
🤖 Ada
We love that customer service is getting smarter & more readily available. Most large organizations already outsource their standard customer care to large call centers. Ada’s products could further reduce their reliance on live support representatives. What’s at stake? Jobs — in America alone, there are 2.8 million call center employees1.
💬 FCC
We love that the internet enables us to make our voices heard to decision makers. Being able to contact government officials has never been easier or more efficient, thanks to technology. What’s at stake? Trust — well-resourced organizations can scheme to improperly influence big decisions by abusing technology, like we saw in the FCC’s online comment submissions; if the public’s voices are drowned out by special interests, trust in government will be further eroded.
The good news about all of our ‘at stake’ features? We can ensure good outcomes if we stay engaged, add our perspectives to these dialogues, and help each other make smart choices about how to balance progress with principals.
While we’re touching on progress and principals…
Did an automated ‘Matt from SWIRL’ write this week’s issue? You’ll never know2.
And that’s it for this week’s SWIRL - see you next week!
-Matt from SWIRL
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Actually, you will know. I did not hire a robot to write SWIRL. But I reserve the right to do so during holiday weekends, like the one coming up in a few weeks. That said, if I ever do include AI-generated content, I promise not to edit it and will clearly denote the AI-text so that we can judge how helpful it is. It could be really funny.