3 safeguards for intelligent machines

Autonomous agents are a huge trend in consumer, business, industry, and other domains. They're popping up in everything from physical devices -- such as Internet of things (IoT) endpoints and mobile handsets -- to cloud services such as virtual personal assistants and smart advisers. Autonomous IoT devices will allow us to multitask like never before. As we incorporate more of them into our lives, we can offload much of the drudgery we once needed to handle manually. We will let self-driving cars manage our commute, offload the more strenuous yardwork to our robotic household assistants, and depend on personal drones to keep an eye on the neighborhood.