Imagine that, in 20 or 30 years, a company creates the first artificially intelligent humanoid robot. She looks like a person, talks like a person, interacts like a person. If you were to meet Ava, you could relate to her even though you know she's a robot. Ava is a fully conscious, fully self-aware being: She communicates; she wants things; she improves herself. She is also, importantly, far more intelligent than her human creators.

Imagine that, in 20 or 30 years, a company creates the first artificially intelligent humanoid robot. She looks like a person, talks like a person, interacts like a person. If you were to meet Ava, you could relate to her even though you know she's a robot.

The Society of Women Engineers recently shared a trove of astonishing documents from the group's archives. They're letters, loads of them, all directed at women engineering students who had contacted various universities about their interest in connecting with other women studying engineering. Lou Alta Melton and Hilda Counts, both students at the University of Colorado in 1919, were trying to start their own professional society. Their letters--and the many responses they received--are part of the Society of Women Engineers sprawling archives, which are housed at Wayne State University in Detroit. "We have not now, have never had, and do not expect to have in the near future, any women students registered in our engineering department," Thorndike Saville, and an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, wrote in his reply to Melton.

Ethics is something the world's largest tech companies are being forced to reckon with. Facebook has been criticized for failing to quickly remove toxic content, including the livestream of the New Zealand mosque shooting. YouTube had to disable comments on videos of minors after pedophiles flocked to its platform. Philosophy professor Abby Everett Jaques of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created a class called Ethics of Technology to help future engineers and computer scientists understand the pitfalls of tech. Philosophy professor Abby Everett Jaques of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created a class called Ethics of Technology to help future engineers and computer scientists understand the pitfalls of tech.

Ethics is something the world's largest tech companies are being forced to reckon with. Facebook has been criticized for failing to quickly remove toxic content, including the livestream of the New Zealand mosque shooting. YouTube had to disable comments on videos of minors after pedophiles flocked to its platform. Philosophy professor Abby Everett Jaques of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created a class called Ethics of Technology to help future engineers and computer scientists understand the pitfalls of tech. Philosophy professor Abby Everett Jaques of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created a class called Ethics of Technology to help future engineers and computer scientists understand the pitfalls of tech.