Artificial intelligence (AI) has crept into our lives without most of us knowing it, transforming our world in profound and exciting ways. "I think a very good precedent that we have in recent history is the web," says François Chollet, a prominent AI researcher and author of Keras, an open source neural networks library. If you're old enough to remember the days of dial-up and throwaway AOL CDs, compare your life before and after the internet became widespread. That's how much AI is going to affect the world--if not more. But with all of this grand talk about how AI is changing us and our world, it's easy to forget something more important: how we're changing AI.

Duckietown is a hands-on, project-based course at MIT that focuses on self-driving vehicles and high-level autonomy. In Spring 2016, Liam Paull served as Duckietown's CEO and Teddy Ort worked as a vehicle autonomy engineer in training. Since the course began at MIT, it has spread to other universities around the globe, and is now taught in universities from Beijing to Zurich.

You might think, based on the type of research they're doing, that the OpenAI office would be full of gadgets, full of wonder, full of weird experiments. There are no Faraday cages. Well, okay, there is a robot. And it's tucked away in a side room. It's surrounded by cobbled-together protective material so that it doesn't smash into itself if it starts flailing about due to a programming error.

How do you teach a car to drive? For many self-driving car makers and artificial intelligence researchers, the answer starts with data and sharing.

Once we have the Singularity, we'll be able to inject nanobots into our bodies that will cure any and all maladies. They'll all be wiped out. And not only that, but actual biological death--the breaking down of organs, aging, etc.--can also be done away with. In addition to defeating death, we'll also be able to expand our knowledge of things beyond comprehension. "By the end of [the 21st century]," Kurzweil writes, "the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will be trillions and trillions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence."

You might think, based on the type of research they're doing, that the OpenAI office would be full of gadgets, full of wonder, full of weird experiments. There are no Faraday cages. Well, okay, there is a robot. And it's tucked away in a side room. It's surrounded by cobbled-together protective material so that it doesn't smash into itself if it starts flailing about due to a programming error.