ON SOME DAYS this summer, the robots would rise, get into their cars and pull onto Sunset Boulevard or Melrose Avenue—streets that, with their sun-sloshed vistas and waving palms, seem engineered for windows-down, volume-up music listening. Yet no matter what radio station they turned to, the robots were greeted by the same song, one they recognized right away. There was the supple, shoulder-lifting guitar lick; that sturdy, urging drumbeat; and the aerial chorus that functions as a brag, a mission statement or both: We're up all night to get lucky. And though Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo—the two...