Machine learning has been an important tool for autonomous car companies as they develop the systems that pilot their vehicles. Instead of rigidly following programming as an app on your phone does, an A.I. system can try to learn to do a task itself, using techniques borrowed from human learning, like pattern recognition and trial and error, and may use hardware modeled on the architecture of a human brain. Currently, the responsibilities of artificial intelligence are mostly limited to tasks like translating texts, helping with medical diagnoses and writing simple articles for media companies. But we can expect to see unimaginable progress in this field in future — and the widespread use of the autonomous car is going to accelerate that process as automobile and technology companies invest ever more resources in its development.

Let’s try to envision that future. As during every other technological revolution, the robots will first transform our economy. People who drive for a living will lose their jobs — around 3 million in the United States alone. E-commerce may experience further booms because of automation, and car ownership is likely to become nearly obsolete as more targeted car sharing and public transportation systems are developed. Eventually, the robot cars could be integrated with other transportation systems. Say that you live in New York City and want to go to China’s Henan Province: You will enter the address into an app, a car will take you to your plane at the airport, and after you land, another will take you directly to your destination.

Robots will begin to creep into other areas of our lives — serving as busboys or waiters, for example — as our investments in robotic transport improve their prowess in areas such as environmental detection and modeling, hyper-complex problem solving and fuzzy-logic applications. With every advance, the use of A.I.-powered robots will expand into other fields: health care, policing, national defense and education.

There will be scandals when things go wrong and backlash movements from the new Luddites. But I don’t think we’ll protest very much. The A.I. systems that drive our cars will teach us to trust machine intelligence over the human variety — car accidents will become very rare, for example — and when given an opportunity to delegate a job to a robot, we will placidly do so without giving it much thought.