Kate Crawford, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, called on the industry to add ethics to the professional training of engineers. 'We need to start changing the skill set of the people who are going to be the data scientists of the future and the A.I. creators of the future,' she said. A.I. systems are pervasive, Ms. Crawford said, pointing to a doll like Hello Barbie, which speaks and listens. 'You might think that's a fantastic toy, that's really wonderful,' she said. 'What you don't realize is that it is the front to this huge data ingestion machine that is taking all of those statements by that child and then using them for a whole range of purposes.'

Artificial intelligence researchers are grappling with more realistic questions like whether their creations will take too many jobs from humans. Eight years after leading artificial intelligence scientists said their field did not need to be regulated, the question of government oversight has re-emerged as the technology has rapidly progressed. On Tuesday, at an event sponsored by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, legal specialists and technologists explored questions about autonomous systems that would increasingly make decisions without human input in areas like warfare, transportation and health. Still, despite improvement in areas like machine vision and speech understanding, A.I. research is still far from matching the flexibility and learning capability of the human mind, researchers at the conference said. "The A.I. community keeps climbing one mountain after another, and as it gets to the top of each mountain, it sees ahead still more mountains," said Ed Felten, a computer scientist who is a deputy chief technology officer in the Office of Science and Technology Policy.