Japan is pushing for 50 locations with driverless services in place within three years, but fully autonomous vehicles remain nearly nonexistent in the country. So far, Fukui Prefecture is the only place with vehicles featuring level-4 capabilities -- defined when they can handle all driving tasks -- but only under specific conditions with the option for humans to take over. In the town of Eiheiji, the seven-seater golf carts are only allowed to navigate a 2 kilometer course. The limited availability of autonomous driving in Japan stands in stark contrast to the U.S. and China, where robotaxis already roam the streets in some cities. Waymo, backed by Google parent Alphabet, and General Motor's Cruise are testing driverless taxi services in San Francisco.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are often typecast as the futuristic underpinnings for a robot-ruled world -- but in reality, federal agencies are already using more practical applications of the technologies today to improve the way they serve Americans and achieve their missions. The space agency's Jet Propulsion Lab wants to leverage the power of the cloud, machine learning and artificial intelligence to open space voyage to all Americans --whether they're standing on the surface of Mars or in the comfort of their homes. "The idea with this is we're all going to be the future explorers," JPL IT Chief Technology and Innovation Officer Tom Soderstrom said at a recent conference. "Your children are the ones who are one day going to walk on Mars, whether it is virtually through augmented reality or physically as astronauts." Indeed, NASA partnered with Amazon Web Services using its automatic speech recognition and natural language understanding service Lex, which are the same deep-learning technologies that drive the Amazon's Alexa, to develop NASA Mars: an app that allows humans to ask questions about Mars and engage them with NASA's missions.