When I visited one of the world’s most advanced car manufacturing plants at Toyota City, Japan, one of the many things about the manufacturing process that struck me as remarkable was that from start to finish, whether molding steel sheets into body parts or fitting those various parts together, almost all the work was done by machines and robots. This is, of course, true of nearly every car manufacturer today.

Take another story. When I opened my first bank account nearly 30 years ago, I had to fill out an application form, attach some documents to it, and submit it to the bank. The bank employee did a whole lot of work—all on paper. Some days later (or weeks, if I remember right), I had my bank account. Recently, when my daughter Lakshmi needed a new bank account, most of the process that used to be done manually was now done by computers. Lakshmi had her new bank account almost instantly.

In both these examples, work that used to be done by people has been “taught” to machines. In other words, the knowledge that was inside people’s heads has been transferred to the machines.

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