In the 1980s, when Uber’s Travis Kalanick and Tesla’s Elon Musk were children, Kanade was working on self-driving cars. He developed the first artificial intelligence capable of sensing freeway lanes, obstacles and other vehicles and changing lanes on its own. He and a team of researchers at CMU drove from Pittsburgh to San Diego in 1995 without touching the steering wheel in the “No Hands Across America” demonstration of autonomous vehicles.