We need strategies to take advantage of breakthroughs in fields as diverse as data mining, artificial intelligence and machine learning, since they are changing the ways we work, research, and live. To navigate this change, Joi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab and author of Whiplash, shares insights from research at the Lab and offers us nine strategies for surviving our faster future.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is on the rise. Life with smart machines is rapidly affecting the way we live and work. A visual signal is the number of companies mentioning it. Kevin Jones, a cancer researcher, describes his work as "taking a bath in uncertainty and unknowns and exceptions and outliers." Dr. Jones suggests the two most important values, given the level of uncertainty in his line of work, are humility and curiosity.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is on the rise. Life with smart machines is rapidly affecting the way we live and work. A visual signal is the number of companies mentioning it. Kevin Jones, a cancer researcher, describes his work as "taking a bath in uncertainty and unknowns and exceptions and outliers." Dr. Jones suggests the two most important values, given the level of uncertainty in his line of work, are humility and curiosity.

The editor in chief for Wired conducted a joint interview with the President of the United States, Barack Obama and MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito. The interview is for the November 2016 issue of Wired, but a condensed version is available on the Wired website. The disruptive emergence of Artificial Intelligence, Space Travel and Star Trek were on the agenda. Artificial Intelligence has gone from science fiction to reality. There are two kinds of Artificial Intelligence, general AI and specialised AI.

IT'S HARD TO think of a single technology that will shape our world more in the next 50 years than artificial intelligence. As machine learning enables our computers to teach themselves, a wealth of breakthroughs emerge, ranging from medical diagnostics to cars that drive themselves. A whole lot of worry emerges as well. Will it take over our jobs? President Obama was eager to address these concerns.

Iyad Rahwan was the first person I heard use the term society-in-the-loop machine learning. He was describing his work which was just published in Science, on polling the public through an online test to find out how they felt about various decisions people would want a self-driving car to make - a modern version of what philosophers call "The Trolley Problem." The idea was that by understanding the priorities and values of the public, we could train machines to behave in ways that the society would consider ethical. We might also make a system to allow people to interact with the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and test the ethics by asking questions or watching it behave. Society-in-the-loop is a scaled up version of human-in-the-loop machine learning - something that Karthik Dinakar at the Media Lab has been working on and is emerging as an important part of AI research.

Related: see Satya Nadella's proposed 10 Laws of AI – they deal with the ethics of AI and AI in a human society head-on.

I recently participated in a meeting of technologists, economists and European philosophers and theologians. Other attendees included Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson, Reid Hoffman, Sam Altman, Father Eric Salobir. One of the interesting things about this particular meeting for me was to have a theological (in this case Christian) perspective to our conversation. Among other things, we discussed artificial intelligence and the future of work. The question about how machines will replace human beings and place many people out of work is well worn but persistently significant.

Iyad Rahwan was the first person I heard use the term society-in-the-loop machine learning. He was describing his work which was just published in Science, on polling the public through an online test to find out how they felt about various decisions people would want a self-driving car to make - a modern version of what philosophers call "The Trolley Problem." The idea was that by understanding the priorities and values of the public, we could train machines to behave in ways that the society would consider ethical. We might also make a system to allow people to interact with the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and test the ethics by asking questions or watching it behave. Society-in-the-loop is a scaled up version of human-in-the-loop machine learning - something that Karthik Dinakar at the Media Lab has been working on and is emerging as an important part of AI research.