Can You Hear Me Now · Episode 11 of 14 · 18 min
When the Endpoint Isn't Human
By one security firm's count, fifty-three percent of web traffic in 2025 came from automated software. The episode follows machines onto the network, from the Internet of Things and birdsong-identifying stations to over-the-air car updates and robotaxis, and shows why latency pushes critical decisions on board. It sets one driver's praise of Tesla's Full Self-Driving beside federal reviews, then makes the case against, including the Mirai botnet.
Who's who
- Kevin AshtonTechnologist who says he coined Internet of Things in 1999
- Frank ChapmanOrnithologist who proposed the first Christmas Bird Count in 1900
- Stefan KahlLead author of the 2021 BirdNET paper
- Holger KlinckSenior author of the 2021 BirdNET paper
- Philip KoopmanCarnegie Mellon engineer who critiques Tesla's safety statistics
Where it happens
- Pacific Grove, California+3 more episodesSite of one of the first Christmas Bird Counts in 1900
- Austin, Texas+2 more episodesWhere Tesla began a limited robotaxi service in 2025
- Hamburg, Germany+1 more episodeHome of IoT Analytics, which counts connected devices
Timeline
- December 25, 1900Frank Chapman's first Christmas Bird Count: twenty-seven counters record about ninety species
- 1999Ashton titles a Procter and Gamble presentation Internet of Things, by his account
- October 21, 2016A Mirai attack on Dyn makes sites including GitHub, Netflix and Airbnb unreachable for many
- 2020Connections of things outnumber connections of phones and computers for the first time
- December 12, 2023Tesla recalls about two million vehicles to add driver-attention controls
- October 7, 2025Federal safety agency opens an evaluation of Full Self-Driving covering about 2.88 million vehicles
Still debated
Whether Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is safer than a human driver is disputed: Tesla cites far fewer collisions per mile, critics call the baselines mismatched, and two federal reviews are open. Counts of connected devices and automated traffic also vary by definition and by who measures.