Self-driving cars will need ethics training, your brain may be the ultimate password, and more top insights

During the week, the Daily Rundown brings you the day’s trending professional news. On the weekend, we try to keep you current on the big ideas that can help you see what’s coming. Read on and join the conversation.

Pittsburgh synagogue shooting leaves 11 dead. Robert Bowers, 46, surrendered to police on Saturday after law enforcement officials said he opened fire at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 people. Six others were injured in the shooting, including four police officers. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Bowers would be brought up on hate crime and other charges. ? Follow the latest developments.

---

How should we teach self-driving cars ethics?

As we inch closer to giving AI control over our cars, we’ll also need to entrust those machines to make instant calls involving life and death. But there’s a problem, according to research from MIT: Different cultures have differing views on who should live and who should die. ? Here’s what people are saying.

• After collecting 40 million decisions across 233 countries and territories, the researchers found some consensus: overall, participants favored sparing the lives of many over the few, humans over animals and the young over the old.
• But dig deeper by geography and things get complicated: respondents in the U.S. and the U.K., for example, favored sparing the lives of the many more than those in Taiwan and Japan. And respondents from China favored saving the elderly over the young more than those in France.
• The findings, published in Nature, raise several questions: Should automakers take such cultural preferences into account when developing self-driving cars? Or should they — or a government body — develop a universal standard?

That lit degree wasn’t such a bad idea after all. 43% of college graduates end up in jobs that don’t actually require a degree, according to a report by labor analytics firm Burning Glass. And humanities majors have ended up faring better than those who opt for degrees in vocationally minded disciplines like business or criminal justice. The stakes of such underemployment are high, with average starting salaries for non-college degree jobs averaging $36,000, compared to $46,000 for those that do require a bachelor’s. ? Here’s what people are saying.

We have a birth problem:

• Hospitals and doctors are huge fans of the Cesarean section to deliver babies. Across the world, C-section procedures have doubled, from 12% in 2000 to 21% of all births in 2015, according to The Lancet.
• The procedure can save lives when it’s needed, but it also poses serious health risks: C-sections can increase the chance of maternal death, lengthen the recovery time after birth and make future deliveries potentially more complicated.
• So, why do medical providers like it so much? It makes child birth more predictable and cuts down the time a mom needs to stay in the hospital, reducing costs, Harvard’s Neel Shah tells Vox. And insurance companies reimburse the procedure at a higher rate than vaginal delivery. ? Here’s what people are saying.

The ultimate password? Your brain. Researchers at the University at Buffalo and the University of Colorado Denver have developed a method that could soon allow you to use your brain waves to unlock doors or start a car. Using a hat or headpiece, a person could record how their brains respond to a few images and pieces of text. That unique brain activity could then serve as a password, with users putting on a similar headpiece to gain access to whatever they’re protecting. Resetting this kind of password would simply require recording brain activity with a new set of images. ? Here’s what people are saying.

One last idea: It’s easy to think that our greatest leaders knew they were destined for big things all along, and that they had supreme control over the efforts they led. But, as General Stanley McChrystal writes, the opposite is often the case.

“Leaders emerge, unexpectedly, much more often than they plot a rise to the top. And once they emerge, they play particular roles more than they dictate events.”

Want to get ahead at work? Looking for advice from the pros? Share your burning career questions in the comments with #YouAsked and we’ll get experts to weigh in.

— Scott Olster