Good morning. Experts including Bill Gates have proposed a tax on robots that would raise revenue to help ease the social and economic adjustment to automation. The Journal's Future of Everything explores how that tax might work. Also today: An autonomous-vehicle specialist in Las Vegas for the CES tech show says machines still aren't adept at predicting human behavior. Is anyone? Thanks for reading.

Will robots hate taxes? We may find out. Experts including Bill Gates are thinking about ways to mitigate the potential social and economic impact of artificial intelligence and robotics. One idea is to tax the usage of robots.

The "threshold" question is whether robots continue a pattern of automation that goes back hundreds of years, in which new technology destroys some jobs but creates more in its wake.

There is a real risk that the next wave of automation and artificial intelligence will displace workers and not create enough jobs, says Daron Acemoglu, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who co-wrote a recent study that found technology already contributing to slower employment growth. In that case, long-standing ideas about technology, taxes and productivity might need to be rethought.

Welcome to Toyota's city of the mobile future. Toyota is transforming a former factory near Mt. Fuji into a 175-acre lab where people will live and work with the latest emerging mobility products, from autonomous vehicles to bikes and scooters, Engadget reports.  

The Toyota Woven City is slated to begin construction in 2021 in conjunction with architect Bjarke Ingels's Big company, which designed the latest Google headquarters and Two World Trade Center, Engadget says. The plan, showcased at CES, will feature three lanes of traffic, for pedestrians, people using personal mobility devices and autonomous vehicles. AI will be deployed for tasks such as trash disposal, and robots or conveyor belts might deliver things to homes, according to Engadget. 

Predicting behavior still a challenge for self-driving cars, industry veteran says. Autonomous vehicles are good at recognizing pedestrians, cyclists, other vehicles and more. But they struggle with understanding what those people and vehicles will do next, said Alberto Broggi, a general manager at California-based AI chip maker Ambarella Inc. and a University of Parma computer science professor who has been working on self-driving vehicle technology since the 1990s.

Dr. Broggi founded VisLab, an Italy-based autonomous-vehicle company that Ambarella acquired in 2015 for $30 million. Among other things, VisLab developed a vehicle that completed a 2,000-kilometer (1,200-mile) autonomous trip across Italy in 1998 and another self-driving system that drove 13,000 kilometers from Italy to China in 2010.

Speaking with WSJ Pro during CES in Las Vegas, Dr. Broggi said he expects fully autonomous vehicles will be here this decade. "People will need to trust the technology because some people may not even want to be driven by a robot. But they will need to...understand that that’s the way to save lives and be more efficient," he said.

Full autonomy on highways is expected to be the first step, he said: "You can just put your car onto the highway, and then let it travel and just take it back [under control] when it goes out. Highways are easy, and that will be just a few years."

For self-driving vehicles, predicting behavior is complicated, he said. "You need to put that intelligence into the autonomous system so that it will be able to understand what it will be doing in the next three to five seconds. The guy on the sidewalk, will he cross the road? Will he just stay there?"

To overcome the challenge, Ambarella is relying on "lots of testing and data acquisition," he said.

--Jared Council

Write to Enterprise Technology Editor Steven Rosenbush and Pro AI Deputy Editor John McCormick.

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