Interesting write-up by Jennifer L. Schenker published end of January on Techonomy. "We should not let Silicon Valley be the mission control for humanity," argues futurist Gerd Leonhard, author of a new book called Tech versus Humanity: The coming clash between man and machine. If autonomous AI software, crunching data far more rapidly than humans, can help eradicate disease and poverty and introduce societal improvements and efficiencies, then we must embrace it, Leonhard says. But "at the same time we have to have governance. And right now there is no such thing."

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.'