The AI company shouting about AI's dangers can't quite bring itself to slow down. T hese are not the words you want to hear when it comes to human extinction, but I was hearing them: "Things are moving uncomfortably fast." I was sitting in a conference room with Sam Bowman, a safety researcher at Anthropic. Worth $183 billion at the latest estimate, the AI firm has every incentive to speed things up, ship more products, and develop more advanced chatbots to stay competitive with the likes of OpenAI, Google, and the industry's other giants. But Anthropic is at odds with itself--thinking deeply, even anxiously, about seemingly every decision. Anthropic has positioned itself as the AI industry's superego: the firm that speaks with the most authority about the big questions surrounding the technology, while rival companies develop advertisements and affiliate shopping links (a difference that Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, was eager to call out during an interview in Davos last week).

Nobody could say exactly when the robots arrived. They seemed to have been smuggled onto campus during the break without any official announcement, explanation, or warning. There were a few dozen of them in total: six-wheeled, ice-chest-sized boxes with little yellow flags on top for visibility. They were there for the students, ferrying deliveries ordered via an app from university food services, but everyone I knew who worked on campus had some anecdote about their first encounter. If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission.

In Katherine Cross' short story "Machine of Loving Grace" -- the final installment in our Better Worlds anthology -- Alexandra and Phoebe must deal with their creation Ami, an artificial intelligence that was designed to moderate online communities, as it fights fire with fire. Cross is a sociologist and a gaming and social critic who is working on her PhD at the City University of New York Graduate Center, specializing in the study of gender and online harassment. Her work has appeared in The Establishment, The Guardian, Gamasutra, Time magazine, and The Verge. The Verge spoke with Cross about how artificial intelligence requires empathy and the importance of moderating online spaces. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

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Artificial intelligence (AI), on the 50th anniversary of its naming, is an autonomous discipline. The field has an established record of success, as exemplified by three recent achievements presented at AAAI-06/IAAI-06. It is now mature enough to collaborate productively with its sister disciplines, realizing the dream of ubiquitous computational intelligence. AI, a field still young as sciences go, is golden in achievement and promise. The 50th anniversary of the naming of our field, at Dartmouth College in 1956, is a time for reminiscence, celebration, and prognostication.

Mr. Markoff focuses on the personalities, since technology depends on the values of its creators. The human element makes the subject accessible. Before welcoming our robotic overlords, read [this] book. You should read this book. As Markoff explains in this engrossing narrative filled with colorful characters and head-snapping insights, the answer is up to us.

In the days of ever-changing playlists and unlimited Soundcloud mixes it might seem strange that something as simple as a compilation album could change the course of music. And yet that was what happened 25 years ago this month, in July 1992, with the release of Warp Records' first Artificial Intelligence compilation. It was a record that helped to launch the careers of Autechre, Aphex Twin and Richie Hawtin, birthed the genre that would later become known as intelligent dance music (or IDM), and changed the idea of electronic music as merely a tool for dancing. Artificial Intelligence wore its heart on its sleeve: the front cover features an android slumped in an armchair in front of a stereo, with albums from Kraftwerk and Pink Floyd scattered around. Below this, the tagline "electronic listening music from Warp" spelled out the compilation's modus operandi: this was electronic music for the home, not the rave – a notion that was largely foreign 25 years ago.

In a poem first published in 1967, Richard Brautigan imagined a world in which people were freed of all their labors and reunited with nature in a world "all watched over by machines of loving grace." In different words, this theme was a hot topic for attendees and presenters at the recent Dell EMC World conference in Las Vegas. Not so much about machines of loving grace, but it seemed that everywhere you went people were talking about machine learning and artificial intelligence, and what this new era means for all of us. In a "Guru Session," Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, explored some of the implications of the rise of AI, including the notion of machines taking over jobs long held by humans. He noted that there are many mundane jobs that humans really shouldn't be doing.

"Intelligent system designers do have ethical responsibilities." I have interviewed John Markoff, technology writer at The New York Times. In 2013 he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. The interview is related to his recent book "Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots, published in August of 2015 by HarperCollins Ecco. Do you share the concerns of prominent technology leaders such as Tesla's chief executive, Elon Musk, who suggested we might need to regulate the development of artificial intelligence?

It is now mature enough to collaborate of a cybernetic meadow productively with its sister disciplines, where mammals and computers realizing the dream of ubiquitous computational live together in mutually intelligence. Several of AI's subdisciplines have wellestablished of our field, at Dartmouth College in 1956, is a They are practitioners while most of our failures are along the lines of achieving successful results later than of Kuhn's "normal" science--filling in boxes we had predicted in our youthful exuberance. Many of the philosophers who lectured us on Other parts of our field seem to be in a what we would never be able to achieve have state of perpetual revolution. Perhaps most gone strangely silent. All this struggle and cybernetics and pattern recognition; however, debate demonstrates the health of the field.