Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) Friend or Foe?

AI (Artificial Intelligence) is increasingly at work all around us everyday. Helping you shop online, recommending movies, managing financial transactions, preventing spam, avoiding funder benders, flying planes, etc. As the world becomes more automated, full of more Big Data, where more decisions are made by machines at a faster pace, the level of delegation of responsibility to our world of machines increases dramatically.

Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Steve Hawking, and other great minds are very concerned about AI. Some of these automated decisions are ethical. We are also teaching machine to learn by themselves. What are the guiding principals that will keep what machine can do and how they will do it within the bounds of our social and human acceptance? How do we keep the genie of AI in the bottle and under control? How do we really and practically prevent AI from taking over, while reaping the benefits of their optimizations? Is AI our friend and helper, or is it ultimately our foe?