Autonomous vehicle technology is advancing rapidly, and hard-core promoters contend that driverless cars could soon be the norm rather than the exception. Many other knowledgeable analysts, however, say widespread adoption of fully autonomous cars is many years -- perhaps decades -- away. The chief reason for the delay is the years it will take to generate the vast amount of data required to make self-driving cars fully safe. But whenever it finally takes over, driverless technology will do much more than ease daily commutes: It will also have a profound impact on the world's economy, notes Lawrence Burns, a former corporate vice president of research, development and planning for General Motors who supervised and encouraged GM's development of robotic driving technology. His new book with Christopher Shulgan is titled, Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car -- And How It Will Reshape Our World. He joined the Knowledge@Wharton show on SiriusXM to talk about how a driverless world will map out. An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

For eighteen years, Jan Scheuermann has been paralyzed from the neck down. She is six feet tall, and she spends all day and all night in a sophisticated, battery-powered wheelchair that cradles her--half sitting, half reclining--from head to toe. In effect, the chair has become an extension of her body. To navigate the world in it, Scheuermann manipulates a cork-tipped joystick with her chin. She can move in this way with remarkable agility, but her height, combined with the bulk of the chair and the unrelenting nature of gravity and matter, can limit her.

Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son, the founder and chief executive of technology conglomerate SoftBank Group Corp, is known for making solid bets in China's hi-tech sector. Around 18 years ago, Son's company invested US$20 million in a small Chinese online retail platform that rapidly grew to become e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding. Son in July invited the heads of fast-rising Chinese companies Ping An Good Doctor and Didi Chuxing to a party he hosted in Tokyo, in a testament to how far these two firms have grown since SoftBank invested in them. Wang Tao, the founder, chairman and chief executive of Ping An Good Doctor, acknowledged Son's contribution amid the Hong Kong-listed online health care provider's efforts to innovate and extend its operations outside the mainland. "Mr Son helped us a lot in our international expansion," said Wang in an interview with the South China Morning Post on the sidelines of the fifth World Internet Conference held earlier this month in Wuzhen, a town in China's eastern coastal province of Zhejiang.

Mark Zuckerberg fiercely defended Facebook in a question-and-answer session with employees on Friday afternoon, pushing back against criticism of the company in the wake of a New York Times investigation into how it reacted to Russian influence operations. In an hour-long video-conference broadcast to Facebook offices around the world, Mr Zuckerberg responded to questions from employees on a range of topics, from Facebook's behaviour over the past 18 months to how it should handle leaks to the media, according to three people familiar with the discussion but not willing to discuss it publicly because it was a private meeting. The idea that Facebook tried to "cover up anything" was wrong, an impassioned Mr Zuckerberg said, using an expletive in his response, according to these people. Some employees responded with muted applause and cheers. The session came at a fraught time for the social network, as executives mobilised to deal with a torrent of criticism of the company.

We're excited to share an interview with Dr. Mark Traill, who is the owner of MammoBot LLC. Mammobot is a cloud-based startup that offers a double reading of screening 2D or 3D mammograms using artificial intelligence algorithms. Clients can upload mammogram studies that become part of the investigational protocol prior to pending FDA approval of the algorithm. Review of the mammogram study by AI algorithms has the potential of detecting early breast cancer that was missed on the initial human review of images. Ambra Health: When did Mammobot begin?

If you don't consider yourself to be tech-savvy, it can be hard to find a good tech gift for the more electronically minded folks in your life, especially since the products themselves are constantly changing. So to figure out which tech gifts and electronics are actually worth the splurge this holiday, I spoke with Ben Arnold, senior director of innovation and trends at the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), which has produced an annual report on consumer technology holiday purchasing patterns for the last 25 years. According to its research, 66 percent of U.S. adults are planning to purchase a tech product as a gift this year, so to help you buy the actually nice gadgets before everyone else catches on, here are 13 electronics and appliances that are bound to be popular this holiday season. Voice speakers, or smart speakers, have been big sellers over the past couple of holiday seasons, and Arnold's research leads him to believe that they'll be popular once again, "especially since Amazon released several new products a couple of weeks ago." He anticipates that smart displays--"which is a screen with all of the smart-speaker features built into it"--are going to be especially popular, like the newest iteration of the Echo Show.

This book aims to get you up to speed with what is, in my opinion, the most powerful data visualization stack going: Python and JavaScript. You'll learn enough about big libraries like Pandas and D3 to start crafting your own web data visualizations and refining your own toolchain. Expertise will come with practice, but this book presents a shallow learning curve to basic competence. If you're reading this, I'd love to hear any feedback you have. Please post it to pyjsdataviz@kyrandale.com. You'll also find a working copy of the Nobel visualization the book literally and figuratively builds toward at http://kyrandale.com/static/pyjsdataviz/index.html. The bulk of this book tells one of the innumerable tales of data visualization, one carefully selected to showcase some powerful Python and JavaScript libraries and tools which together form a toolchain. This toolchain gathers raw, unrefined data at its start and delivers a rich, engaging web visualization at its end. Like all tales of data visualization, it is a tale of transformation--in this case, transforming a basic Wikipedia list of Nobel Prize winners into an interactive visualization, bringing the data to life and making exploration of the prize's history easy and fun. A primary motivation for writing the book is the belief that, whatever data you have and whatever story you want to tell with it, the natural home for the visualizations you transform it into is the Web.

When did you realize you were a machine? But one whose parts and operations can be described like the components of a computer. I remember a day in 2012 when this thought pierced me to the bone. I was in the lab of John Donoghue at Brown University. Donoghue is a professor of neuroscience and a pioneer in the development of brain-computer interfaces. With easygoing authority, Donoghue was detailing for me the ways he and his colleagues taught Cathy Hutchinson, a 58-year-old woman who had lost control of her limbs in a stroke, to control a robotic arm with her thoughts and sip coffee from a bottle.

For many avid listeners of public radio, Intelligence Squared U.S. has been a mainstay program for more than ten years. The premise of the show, which debuted in 2006, is reasoned yet passionate debate, with two sides arguing for or against a motion. Recent resolutions include "Globalization Has Undermined America's Working Class" and "The More We Evolve, The Less We Need God." With so much consternation now focused on technology, the show, in partnership with Techonomy, took on Silicon Valley, proposing "Silicon Valley Has Lost Its Soul." Arguing for the motion were Noam Cohen, WIRED contributor and author of The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball and Dipayan Ghosh, the Pozen Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. Holding against were Leslie Berlin, project historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford, and Joshua McKenty, vice president at Pivotal, and founder and chief architect of NASA Nebula. To see who prevailed in ...

Time travel to the UK in 2025: Harry is a teenager with a smartphone and Pauline is a senior citizen with Alzheimer's who relies on smart glasses for independent living. Harry is frustrated his favourite online game is slow, and Pauline is anxious because her healthcare app is unresponsive. Forbes predicts that by 2025 more than 80 billion devices, from wearables and smartphones, to factory and smart-city sensors, will be connected to the internet. Something like 180 trillion gigabytes of data will be generated that year. Currently almost all data we generate is sent to and processed in distant clouds.