The book The Driver in the Driverless Car by Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever explores how technology is changing faster and faster, and what impact that can have on the future of our society. It aims to help anyone - technical or non-technical - frame decisions and thinking about rapidly developing technologies. Salkever and Wadhwa cover a wide variety of such technologies, including robotics, AI, quantum computing, and driverless cars. InfoQ interviewed Wadhwa and Salkever about how the future from a technological point of view can look, how to approach technology in a positive way, what tasks robots are able to do or not do and what the future will bring, the benefits that self-driving cars bring and the challenges developing them, what developments are causing energy to become cheaper and cleaner, and what becomes possible with quantum computing. InfoQ: What made you decide to write this book?

MILES O'BRIEN: We're going to get a better picture tomorrow of how strong job creation is when the monthly employment report comes out. But whatever that snapshot looks like, there are concerns about the rise of robotics and automation, and what that means for the future of the work force. Our economics correspondent, Paul Solman, has been exploring that subject. PAUL SOLMAN: In Silicon Valley, author Vivek Wadhwa says he already lives in the future. OK, so, your car can open the garage door and greet you in the driveway?

President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on immigration reform. Entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa says the RAISE Act could be good for the country. Editor's note: Silicon Valley entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa has appeared frequently on this page, most recently here. I was shooting with him just last week in and around his home in Palo Alto for a story on his new book, "The Driver in the Driverless Car," and his forecast of an imminent job crisis caused by high technology and what we as a society should do about it. And more to the point, high tech in the form his Tesla, which can already do a lot of the driverless driving, including parking itself in Vivek's garage by remote control -- somewhat haltingly -- as this brief 1:33 video clip demonstrates: An immigrant from India, Vivek has been a staunch -- some would say "strident" -- supporter of diversity, especially in high tech, where he has found it lamentably lacking with regard to both gender and race.

By Vivek Wadhwa "Carnage in Indian IT," read a headline about retrenchments in its outsourcing industry as markets stagnate and US visa restrictions erode profits. The Indian IT industry generates $150 billion in revenue but is facing an existential crisis largely of its own making because it became complacent and overconfident even as technologies and markets changed. It can survive only if it exits the business that brought it success and reinvents itself. India's outsourcing boomed during the Y2K crisis of the late '90s because there was an urgency in repairing corporate IT systems. Once chief information officers (CIOs) became comfortable with having their systems maintained across the globe, they started outsourcing large-scale projects to Indian companies, and billion-dollar contracts were announced almost every week. But with the advent of tablets and smartphones and their applications in the 2010s, users gained access to better technology than the companies' IT departments could provide.

Technology is advancing so rapidly that we will experience radical changes in society not only in our lifetimes but in the coming years. We are already seeing how computing, sensors, artificial intelligence, and genomics are reshaping entire industries and our daily lives. As we undergo this rapid change, many of the old assumptions we have relied will no longer apply. Technology is creating a new set of rules that will change our very existence. Digitization began with words and numbers.

Technology is advancing so rapidly that we will experience radical changes in society not only in our lifetimes but in the coming years. We have already begun to see ways in which computing, sensors, artificial intelligence and genomics are reshaping entire industries and our daily lives. As we undergo this rapid change, many of the old assumptions that we have relied on will no longer apply. Technology is creating a new set of rules that will change our very existence. Digitization began with words and numbers. Then we moved into games and later into rich media, such as movies, images and music.

This article is by Featured Blogger Vivek Wadhwa from his LinkedIn page. We have been hearing predictions for decades of a takeover of the world by artificial intelligence. In 1957, Herbert A. Simon predicted that within 10 years a digital computer would be the world's chess champion. That didn't happen until 1996. And despite Marvin Minsky's 1970 prediction that "in from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being," we still consider that a feat of science fiction.

Vivek Wadhwa has been named to the Carnegie Mellon University College of Engineering faculty as a distinguished fellow on its Silicon Valley campus, the Pittsburgh, Pa.-based university recently announced. In his role, Wadhwa will be teaching classes in exponential technologies, technology convergence and industry disruption, and the new rules of innovation. He will also be researching technologies and helping members of the Pittsburgh faculty connect with the Silicon Valley. "CMU is doing some of the most advanced research in areas such as robotics, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, autonomous cars and almost every field of engineering and bioengineering," Wadhwa said in an emailed statement. "This will provide me direct access to the amazing faculty and enable me to help them make a much greater impact on the world."