In June, at a conference set in the picturesque Italian town of Campagna, south-east of Naples, two physicists in a seemingly endless argument over a long-sought theory of fundamental reality caught my attention. From the sidelines, an unassuming figure politely interrupted them. "I've got a slide that might help. Can I put it up?" asked Frank Wilczek. The slide, concisely describing the realms in which this theory may act, swiftly ended the dispute.

John Brockman: On the Promise and Peril of AI • Seth Lloyd: Wrong, but More Relevant Than Ever • Judea Pearl: The Limitations of Opaque Learning Machines • Stuart Russell: The Purpose Put Into the Machine • George Dyson: The Third Law • Daniel C. Dennett: What Can We Do? • Rodney Brooks: The Inhuman Mess Our Machines Have Gotten Us Into • Frank Wilczek: The Unity of Intelligence • Max Tegmark: Let's Aspire to More Than Making Ourselves Obsolete • Jaan Tallinn: Dissident Messages • Steven Pinker: Tech Prophecy and the Underappreciated Causal Power of Ideas • David Deutsch: Beyond Reward and Punishment • Tom Griffiths: The Artificial Use of Human Beings • Anca Dragan: Putting the Human into the AI Equation • Chris Anderson: Gradient Descent • David Kaiser: "Information" for Wiener, for Shannon, and for Us • Neil Gershenfeld: Scaling • W. Daniel Hillis: The First Machine Intelligences • Venki Ramakrishnan: Will Computers Become Our Overlords?