In a few decades, artificial intelligence (AI) will surpass many of the abilities that we believe make us special.

This is a grand challenge for our age and it may require an "irrational" response.

One of the most significant pieces of news from the US in early 2017 was the efforts of Google to make autonomous driving a reality.

According to a report, Google's self-driving cars clocked 1,023,330 km and required human intervention 124 times.

That is one intervention about every 8,047 km of autonomous driving.

But even more impressive is the progress in just a single year: human interventions fell from 0.8 times per thousand miles to 0.2, a 400% improvement.

With such progress, Google's cars will easily surpass my own driving ability later this year.

Driving once seemed to be a very human skill.

But we said that about chess, too.

Then a computer beat the human world champion, repeatedly.