The same thing happens when Joydeep Biswas, an engineer who has built a robotic soccer team, talks about its clever teamwork; when Adrien Treuille, a computer scientist, speaks with evangelical fervor about online collaboration; when Sebastian Thrun, the autonomous-vehicle and online-learning pioneer, describes how the networked cars of the future will learn from one another's mistakes, outperforming human drivers, who are doomed to crash in solitude.