After years of promise, AI is finally becoming useful. But what usually happens to useful technologies is that they disappear. We forget about the things that just work, and we shouldn’t let that happen to AI. Any technology destined to change the world needs scrutiny, and AI, with its combination of huge imaginative presence and very real, very dangerous failings, needs that scrutiny more than most.

So, for the AI Issue at The Verge, we’re taking a closer look at some of the ways artificial intelligence and machine learning are affecting technology right now — because it’s too late to understand something after it’s changed the world.