The claim that cars will soon safely drive themselves on public roads -- more safely than humans -- sounds fantastic, if not impossible. Yet breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, a concept that's becoming more familiar to non-computer scientists, are powering technological advances that likely will bring many driverless capabilities within reach of automakers in the next five years. Many of the AI principles used by developers of autonomous and driverless software are based on the same used by IBM (IBM), which developed a chess program that first defeated a world champion in 1996, and by Alphabet's (GOOGL) Deep Mind unit that last week defeated the world Go champion. Alphabet is a holding in Jim Cramer's Action Alerts PLUS Charitable Trust Portfolio. Want to be alerted before Cramer buys or sells GOOGL?