C-3PO tends to be most people's first representation of a super smart robot. Star Wars' beloved protocol droid acts very much as an individual, with its own distinct personality. The films never address the question, but C-3PO's intellgence appears to reside entirely on the droid's CPU.

But when artificially intelligent machines become prevalent here in the real world, they won't work like that at all. Self-driving cars won't really drive themselves. They will be driven largely by brains in the cloud.

The U.S. House of Representative's unanimously passed a bill this week offered by Ohio's Rep. Bob Latta, greenlighting the deployment of autonomous vehicles. Key leaders in the Senate have expressed an appetite for such legislation, but its language on riders' privacy looks inadequate to some advocates.