We argue that the concept of practical wisdom is particularly useful for organising, understanding, and improving human-machine interactions. We consider the relationship between philosophical analysis of wisdom and psychological research into the development of wisdom. We adopt a practical orientation that suggests a conceptual engineering approach is needed, where philosophical work involves refinement of the concept in response to contributions by engineers and behavioural scientists. The former are tasked with encoding as much wise design as possible into machines themselves, as well as providing sandboxes or workspaces to help various stakeholders build practical wisdom in systems that are sufficiently realistic to aid transferring skills learned to real-world use. The latter are needed for the design of exercises and methods of evaluation within these workspaces, as well as ways of empirically assessing the transfer of wisdom from workspace to world. Systematic interaction between these three disciplines (and others) is the best approach to engineering wisdom for the machine age.

Topic models remain a black box both for modelers and for end users in many respects. From the modelers' perspective, many decisions must be made which lack clear rationales and whose interactions are unclear — for example, how many topics the algorithms should find (K), which words to ignore (aka the "stop list"), and whether it is adequate to run the modeling process once or multiple times, producing different results due to the algorithms that approximate the Bayesian priors. Furthermore, the results of different parameter settings are hard to analyze, summarize, and visualize, making model comparison difficult. From the end users' perspective, it is hard to understand why the models perform as they do, and information-theoretic similarity measures do not fully align with humanistic interpretation of the topics. We present the Topic Explorer, which advances the state-of-the-art in topic model visualization for document-document and topic-document relations. It brings topic models to life in a way that fosters deep understanding of both corpus and models, allowing users to generate interpretive hypotheses and to suggest further experiments. Such tools are an essential step toward assessing whether topic modeling is a suitable technique for AI and cognitive modeling applications.

As artificial intelligence moves ever closer to the goal of producing fully autonomous agents, the question of how to design and implement an artificial moral agent (AMA) becomes increasingly pressing. Robots possessing autonomous capacities to do things that are useful to humans will also have the capacity to do things that are harmful to humans and other sentient beings. Theoretical challenges to developing artificial moral agents result both from controversies among ethicists about moral theory itself, and from computational limits to the implementation of such theories. In this paper the ethical disputes are surveyed, the possibility of a ‘moral Turing Test’ is considered and the computational difficulties accompanying the different types of approach are assessed. Human-like performance, which is prone to include immoral actions, may not be acceptable in machines, but moral perfection may be computationally unattainable. The risks posed by autonomous machines ignorantly or deliberately harming people and other sentient beings are great. The development of machines with enough intelligence to assess the effects of their actions on sentient beings and act accordingly may ultimately be the most important task faced by the designers of artificially intelligent automata.