When better to hold a conference on artificial intelligence and the countless ways it is advancing science than in those brief days between the first Nobel prizes being awarded in the field and the winners heading to Stockholm for the lavish white tie ceremony? It was fortuitous timing for Google DeepMind and the Royal Society who this week convened the AI for Science Forum in London. Last month, Google DeepMind bagged the Nobel prize in chemistry a day after AI took the physics prize. Scientists have worked with AI for years, but the latest generation of algorithms have brought us to brink of transformation, Demis Hassabis, the chief executive officer of Google DeepMind, told the meeting. "If we get it right, it should be an incredible new era of discovery and a new golden age, maybe even a kind of new renaissance," he said.

Kazuo Ishiguro's latest novel, Klara and the Sun, presents us with a world in which not one but two kinds of artificial intelligence have arrived. In the book's strangely familiar near-future, AI has upended the social order, the world of work, and human relationships all at once. Intelligent machines toil in place of office workers and serve as dutiful companions, or "Artificial Friends." Some children have themselves become another form of AI, having had their intelligence upgraded via genetic engineering. These enhanced, or "lifted," humans create a social schism, dividing people into an elite ruling order and an underclass of the unmodified and grudgingly idle.

Upon meeting for the first time at a dinner at Stanford earlier this year, Fei-Fei Li and Jennifer Doudna couldn't help but note the remarkable parallels in their experiences as scientists. Stanford's Fei-Fei Li and Jennifer Doudna of UC Berkeley will discuss the ethics of artificial intelligence and CRISPR technology. Both women helped kickstart twin revolutions that are profoundly reshaping society in the 21st century – Li in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and Doudna in the life sciences. Both revolutions can be traced back to 2012, the year that computer scientists collectively recognized the power of Li's approach to training computer vision algorithms and that Doudna drew attention to a new gene-editing tool known as CRISPR-Cas9 ("CRISPR" for short). Both pioneering scientists are also driven by a growing urgency to raise awareness about the ethical dangers of the technologies they helped create.

In 1797, at the dawn of the industrial age, Goethe wrote "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," a poem about a magician in training who, through his arrogance and half-baked powers, unleashes a chain of events that he could not control.

About 20 years later, a young Mary Shelley answered a dare to write a ghost story, which she shared at a small gathering at Lake Geneva. Her story would go on to be published as a novel, "Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus," on Jan. 1, 1818. Both are stories about our powers to create things that take on a life of their own. Goethe's poem comes to a climax when the apprentice calls out in a panic: While the master fortunately returns just in time to cancel the treacherous spell, Shelley's tale doesn't end so nicely: Victor Frankenstein's monster goes on a murderous rampage, and his creator is unable to put a stop to the carnage. That's the question we face on the 200th anniversary of "Frankenstein," as we find ourselves grappling with the unintended consequences of our creations on Facebook, to artificial intelligence and human genetic engineering.