AI might be the new electricity

Someday you might have a significant relationship with your toaster. With a few silicon chips and the right programming, it'll use its considerable downtime to compose original musical interludes to play while your English muffin is browning. It'll text you Haikus designed to make you smile: This change won't happen by itself. Students are working hard to master the art and science of designing machines that learn, make decisions, create, think. Starting this fall, the Illinois Institute of Technology -- in recent years branding itself as the more brawny "Illinois Tech" -- became the only college in the Midwest to offer an undergraduate major in artificial intelligence, creating the systems that will guide everything from robots to trucks to medical care.