A robot conducts the Orchestra Filarmonica di Lucca at Teatro Verdi in Pisa, Italy, this September. The ongoing artificial-intelligence revolution will change almost every line of work, creating enormous social and economic opportunities -- and challenges. Some believe that intelligent computers will push humans out of the job market and create a new'useless class'; others maintain that automation will generate a wide range of new human jobs and greater prosperity for all. Almost everybody agrees that we should take action to prevent the worst-case scenarios. The automation revolution is emerging from the confluence of two scientific tidal waves. Computer scientists are developing artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that can learn, analyse massive amounts of data and recognize patterns with superhuman efficiency.

The field of transportation is undergoing a seismic shift with the introduction of autonomous driving -- or computer-driven cars. Computer vision scientist and Mobileye co-founder Amnon Shashua PhD '93 described the challenges associated with this technology in a talk last month hosted by MIT's Center for Brains, Minds and Machines (CBMM). The technology behind computer driven cars, Shashua explained, involves machine learning and the latest cutting-edge artificial intelligence algorithms in three major areas: sensing, planning, and mapping. Shashua earned his PhD in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences in 1993. He received postdoctoral training under Professor Tomaso Poggio at MIT's Center for Biological and Computational Learning (now CBMM) and currently holds the Sachs Chair in computer science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.