Our scientists saw today

Driverless cars are already here.

Christchurch International Airport is trialling a self- driving shuttle at the end of the year and every Tesla Model 3 vehicle hitting the market next year will include full “Level 5” autonomy.

“That means you can get in the car, you can go to sleep, and the car takes you where you want to go — you don’t need to pay any attention to it at all,” technology summit organiser and speaker Kaila Colbin says.

“This is different from current autopilot systems, which are not considered fully autonomous systems as you still need to have an alert driver at the wheel.”

This technology would take off much faster than we think — mainly because of the many benefits and cost advantages they offer over today’s vehicles.

It would make those often long and mundane commutes to work more tolerable — and would save lives. “We kind of ignore the fact that 1. 2 million people die every year in motor vehicle crashes, so it ’ll be a great thing.” There has been much debate about whether the impact of artificial intelligence ( AI) on the workplace has been over-hyped.

But one only has to look to Kunshan, China, where 60,000 factory workers at major Apple supplier Foxconn have just been replaced with robots.

“It ’s still more economical to have it done by a robot,” Colbin says.

“But, on the actual performance side of things rather than just the price side, robots are getting so sophisticated that they’re starting to replace jobs that we don’t typically think of as being at risk of automation.”

The world recently saw the first AI lawyer hired by a law firm, along with an AI teaching assistant helping students with their studies.

“We even had a 19-year- old kid who wrote a free SnapChat bot that successfully contested over 160,000 parking tickets in New York and London,” says Colbin.

“We’re going to start to see machine