How Artificial Intelligence Can Change Higher Education

On the day I met Sebastian Thrun in Palo Alto, the State of California legalized self-driving cars. Gov. Jerry Brown arrived at the Google campus in one of the company's computer-controlled Priuses to sign the bill into law. "California is a big deal," said Thrun, the founder of Google's autonomous-car program, "because it tends to be hard to legislate here." He said it with typical understatement. An idea that was in its technological infancy a decade ago, when Thrun and his colleagues were racing to develop a vehicle that could drive itself more than a few miles on a desert test course, was now being officially sanctioned by the country's most populous state.