Why Silicon Valley is the new Detroit

The “Transformers” franchise is based on a fictitious future where cars and trucks turn into sentient robots.

This general idea, originally conceived as a scheme to sell toys and cereal, turns out to what’s happening in real life.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said this week in an interview the most profound thing that can be said about the future of cars. He said: 

"An autonomous car is a robot."

It's a perfect sentence. It answers the question: "Why would technology companies, generally, or Apple in particular, make cars?" 

The false belief is that technology companies like Apple would be making a massive pivot to get into the car business. 

What's true is that car companies would have to make a massive pivot to get into the robot business. 

Observing what’s happening to cars in the 21st Century, they’re “transforming” into robots.

It's not clear that Toyota, Volkswagen, Daimler, Ford, Honda, General Motors or Fiat will be able to build the engineering expertise necessary to integrate artificial intelligence (AI), sensors, onboard computer systems, machine vision, 5G/edge networking and all the rest to compete in a future where people are carried around by supercomputer robots. 

It's clear that Apple will be able to do this, as well as Amazon (Zooks), Google (i.e. Waymo), Xiaomi, Sony and other tech companies. It's clear that Silicon Valley-based Tesla will do this. 

As Cook pointed out in the interview, the "magic" of a self-driving car comes from the integration of hardware, software and services and that Apple "owns" the primary technology for making this kind of magic. 

So it's time for educated observers to shed the delusion that technology companies making cars is strange or unlikely.

The self-driving car of the future is an advanced robot powered by AI. For a technology companies, to build a self-driving car is to continue to build advanced technology products. 

For car companies to build a self-driving car, a massive and unlikely pivot is required into a range of new, extreme technology specialties. 

I predict that most existing car companies will not survive the transition to self-driving cars, and that Silicon Valley (i.e. the world of technology companies) will take over the car market over the next ten years. 

Because what Tim Cook said today tells you everything you need to know: "An autonomous car is a robot."