Self-driving cars get all the press. But there are lots of autonomous systems navigating the physical world, and more to come.
"The smart machine era will be the most disruptive in the history of IT," David Cearley, vice president & Gartner Fellow, declared recently. One in three jobs will be converted to software, robots, and smart machines by 2025, Gartner predicts.
Driving this phenomenon are improvements in hardware and software, including a profusion of fast and affordable sensors, wireless networks including short-range networks for machine-to-machine communications.