Ito became a disc jockey working in nightclubs in
Chicago such as
the Limelight and Smart Bar, also working with Metasystems Design Group to start a
virtual community in Tokyo. Ito was on the board of Culture Convenience Club (CCC),
Tucows, and
EPIC, and
WITNESS. In October 2004, he was named to the board of
ICANN for a three-year term starting December 2004. In August 2005, he joined the board of the
Mozilla Foundation, until April 2016. He was on the board of the
Open Source Initiative (OSI) from March 2005 until April 2007. He was a founding board member of Expression College for Digital Arts as well as the Zero One Art and Technology Network. In 1999, he was the associate to Mr. Mount (the executive producer) on the film
The Indian Runner. Ito also was a board member of
Energy Conversion Devices from 1995 to 2000.
Twitter,
Six Apart,
Technorati,
Flickr,
Wikia,
SocialText,
Dopplr,
Last.fm,
Rupture,
Kongregate,
Fotopedia,
Diffbot,
Formlabs,
3Dsolve and other Internet companies. and
The New York Times and has published articles in numerous other magazines and newspapers. He has written regular columns in
The Daily Yomiuri,
Mac World Japan,
Asahi Pasocom,
Asahi Doors, and other media sources. His photographs have been used in
The New York Times online,
BusinessWeek,
American Heritage,
Wired News,
Forbes, and
BBC News. He was on the early editorial mastheads of
Wired and
Mondo 2000. He has authored and co-authored a number of books including
Dialog – Ryu Murakami X Joichi Ito with
Ryu Murakami, and
Freesouls: Captured and Released with Christopher Adams, a book of Ito's photographs that includes essays by several prominent figures in the
free culture movement. He has hosted televisions shows including
The New Breed,
SimTV and a TV show called
Super-Presentation airing weekly in Japan on
NHK. panel discussion
Creative Commons Ito served as a board member, chairman of the board, and CEO of
Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the legal sharing and reuse of content. As an influential figure in the organization's leadership, Ito was credited with playing a key role in expanding both the funding and the global reach of Creative Commons, which grew to include affiliates in more than 70 countries. His selection as chairman in 2006, replacing founder Lawrence Lessig, was specifically cited as a reflection of Creative Commons' increasing interest in supporting the integration of CC licenses and principles within commercial applications and the broader "sharing economy". He later served as CEO, during which time he focused on accelerating Creative Commons' efforts in education and open educational resources (OER). Due to his efforts, Al Jazeera, the White House, Wikipedia, and Google all began releasing material under the Creative Commons licenses.
Safecast Following the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster,
Sean Bonner, Pieter Franken, and Ito co-founded the citizen science initiative
Safecast in March 2011 to address the lack of transparent and reliable environmental radiation data provided by the Japanese government. Safecast, which is primarily volunteer-run, designed and built low-cost, mobile Geiger counter devices, such as the bGeigie and bGeigie Nano, that use GPS to enable citizens to crowdsource and upload highly localized radiation measurements. This effort resulted in the creation of the world's largest open dataset of background radiation measurements, establishing a model for open data and citizen-led environmental monitoring.
MIT Media Lab (2011–2019) In April 2011, Ito was named the director of the
MIT Media Lab; he began in this role on September 1, 2011, as the lab's fourth director. His appointment was called an "unusual choice" since Ito studied at two colleges, but did not finish his degrees. "The choice is radical, but brilliant", said
Larry Smarr, director of
Calit2.
Nicholas Negroponte, Media Lab's co-founder and chairman emeritus, described the choice as bringing the media to "Joi's world". In an interview with
Asian Scientist Magazine, Ito discussed his vision for the MIT Media Lab, and how he liked the word "learning" better than the word "education". Ito was tasked with managing the MIT Media Lab annual budget of approximately $75 million, primarily funded through a consortium of about 90 corporate sponsors who pay a membership fee. This unique funding model allowed the lab's faculty and 230 graduate students to bypass the typical fundraising requirements, such as writing grant proposals, by distributing the pooled funds internally. While corporate members (including companies like Lego, Toshiba, and ExxonMobil) received an early look at inventions, the lab maintains its research freedom and has explicitly fired companies for being "too bottom-line oriented" or attempting to dictate product outcomes. The lab's mission has been to foster innovation without being bound to contracts or quarterly profits, enabling researchers to explore ideas that may lead to future technologies like mind-surfing, advanced prosthetics, and "food computers" for controlled agriculture. Ito wrote an essay in
The New York Times about the importance of open innovation and how less regulation promotes innovation. In 2012, Ito discussed in a
Wired magazine interview the coming chaos of transformation brought about by decreasing costs of innovation. Ito first highlights how Moore's Law has decreased the cost of innovation, collaboration and distribution. Next, because of these increases in innovation, massive societal transformation are under way in a chaotic and sometimes destructive fashion and Ito highlighted some principles for how to stay resilient in this accelerating transformation, one could perceive as unpredictable change. Ito notably outlined nine principles of resilience. In 2013, Ito proposed, in an interview in
Fast Company, a solution for urban renewal is for cities to get out of the way and make it easier for young people to innovate. In 2013, he announced an MIT Media Lab partnership with an independent investment fund called "E14" to give MIT Media Lab students a six-month runway to launch a startup. Upon return on investments, the MIT Media Lab also receives money back to the institute. As of 2025, E14 is still in operation and has backed more than 100 Media Lab companies and has organized event programming for the MIT Media Lab startup community.
Wired interviewed Ito in 2014 about the future of making being the fusing of technology with living matter. That year, Ito and from IDEO held a conversation about the future of making at
SXSW Interactive Festival. Ito gave the keynote at the 2015
Oreilly's Solid Conference titled, "Why Bio is the New Digital". Ito and Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte discussed with
Wired magazine about the major transformative technologies that came from the Media Lab including
e-Ink,
touchscreens,
GPS and
wearables. In June 2016, Ito was appointed professor of the practice of media arts and sciences at MIT. Ito wrote an essay about the future of work in the age of artificial intelligence after attending a meeting of technologists, economists and European philosophers and theologians including
Andrew McAfee,
Erik Brynjolfsson,
Reid Hoffman,
Sam Altman, and .
John Markoff discussed his work with Reid Hoffman on Artificial Intelligence Ethics in
The New York Times. At the time, there were three groups working on AI Ethics intensively, the MIT Media Lab effort spearheaded by Ito and Hoffman later unveiled in 2017, a Stanford project called the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence which included Google's parent company, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft. And then separately, Google's DeepMind decided to work on their own effort. The MIT Media Lab effort stated its aim was to "keep society in the loop." Ito, in particular, stated the importance of Artificial Intelligence Ethics is to make sure computer scientists are interacting with social scientists and philosophers. In November, Ito and then US President
Barack Obama had a conversation about Artificial Intelligence, neural nets, and self-driving cars published in
Wired magazine. In December, Ito wrote a
The New York Times op-ed, "Well-Intentioned Uses of Technology Can Go Wrong". Ito proposed that the emerging artificial intelligence trend where engineers train machines to augment collective intelligence, be called "extended intelligence" or E.I. He noted that the challenge with E.I. is that it can amplify both the best and worst aspects of society. He stated that it is essential to develop a framework for how ethics, government, educational system and media evolve in the age of machine intelligence.
David Kirkpatrick and Ito conversed at the 2017 World Economic Forum in Davos where Ito stated that "science and technology alone will not win in the Fourth Industrial Revolution". In 2017, under Ito's leadership as Media Lab director, the MIT Media Lab launched the Space Exploration Initiative at the "Beyond the Cradle: Envisioning a New Space Age" symposium, which he personally welcomed to 250 attendees and 300+ global livestream viewers. Ito, serving as a principal investigator alongside MIT VP Maria Zuber, framed space as the ultimate convergence of art, design, science, and engineering—driving a new multidisciplinary program that had already engaged over 40 faculty and students (and continued to expand across MIT departments) to pioneer accessible technologies for interplanetary life, democratize "open space", and apply space innovations to Earth. The student-initiated event, organized by PhD candidates
Ariel Ekblaw and Dan Novy, featured NASA astronauts, sci-fi visionaries, and industry leaders, reinforcing Ito's vision of space exploration as a creative, inclusive mission to inspire humanity's next generation. In 2017, Ito along with Neha Narula stated, "the Blockchain will do to the financial system what the Internet did to media" in the
Harvard Business Review. Ito co-founded the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund which received US$5.9 Million split between the MIT Media Lab and Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Ito was interviewed by NPR about citizen science and how everyday citizens can help gather data as with his project
Safecast which launched after the
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster to gather radiation data in March 2011. In 2018, Ito and
Jonathan Zittrain co-taught a collaborative Harvard-M.I.T. digital ethics course titled, "The Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence". Ito wrote about the limits of explainability in
Wired magazine related to the research of MIT Media Lab researcher
Josh Tenenbaum. The article argues that human intuition—powered by innate "intuitive engines" for physics, social dynamics, and rapid probabilistic judgments—remains undervalued in AI research and scientific reductionism, which prioritize explainable statistical models trained on vast data but lack true causal understanding. By contrasting infant learning through real-world interaction with AI's pattern-matching limitations, it calls for embracing unexplainable intuition to advance AI and foster humility in tackling complex, nonlinear problems like ecology. That year, Ito wrote in
Wired magazine about the paradox of
Universal Basic Income (UBI), an idea that has historically attracted rare bipartisan support from figures like
Milton Friedman and
Martin Luther King Jr., but simultaneously faces opposition from both conservatives and liberals. Touted as a potential solution to severe income disparity and mass job displacement due to automation, Ito wrote that the concept is plagued by the financial difficulty articulated by researcher Luke Martinelli: "an affordable UBI is inadequate, and an adequate UBI is unaffordable." He went on to say conservative critics worry about the cost and the potential for a decrease in the incentive to work, while skeptical liberals fear it would be used by politicians as a pretext to dismantle the existing social safety net and empower employers to lower wages. Nevertheless, the article highlights ongoing trials, such as
Sam Altman's Basic Income Project, and concrete proposals, including
Chris Hughes' plan to expand the
Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and fund it through increased taxes on the wealthiest, as necessary steps toward an evidence-based understanding of UBI's actual economic and social impact. Ito proposed that artificial intelligence should be viewed as a "mirror" rather than a "crystal ball", arguing that the technology reflects existing societal biases rather than providing objective predictions. He suggested that by recognizing AI as a reflection of human and institutional flaws, society can use these tools to identify and address systemic inequalities. From 2018 until 2019, Ito was a member of the "Council on Extended Intelligence", an initiative focused the ethics and governance of Artificial Intelligence, launched by the MIT Media Lab and the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
Philosophy and leadership principles Ito's leadership at the Media Lab was guided by his nine principles, which emphasized emergent systems over traditional authority.
MLTalks series and interdisciplinary dialogue Ito institutionalized the MLTalks series (originally known as the Media Lab Conversations Series). This platform served as a public forum for antidisciplinary dialogue, bringing together global leaders, activists, and researchers to discuss the intersection of technology, society, and ethics. Significant sessions included: • Global Health and Activism: In November 2014, Ito hosted a discussion on the challenges of fighting Ebola with
Ophelia Dahl, Dr. Megan Murray, and
David Sengeh. • Director's Fellows Panels: In January 2015, a panel featured
Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi,
Maurice Ashley,
Marko Ahtisaari, Gabriella Gomez-Mont, and
Baratunde Thurston, focusing on how diverse backgrounds in activism and chess catalyze creative collaboration. He also hosted the Presidential Innovation Fellows, including Smita Satiani and Kyla Fullenwider. • Space and the Anthropocosmos: Conversations with
Ariel Ekblaw and
Joseph Paradiso explored the "Space Exploration Initiative" and the future of life beyond Earth. • Technology, Narrative, and Humanity: Ito hosted influential thinkers such as
Douglas Rushkoff (discussing
Team Human),
Neal Stephenson,
Warren Ellis, and
Jaron Lanier. • Ethics, Justice, and Civil Rights: These dialogues featured
Ibram X. Kendi on antiracism,
Shaka Senghor on criminal justice reform, and
Julia Angwin on "Quantifying Forgiveness." • Science and Education: Conversations included
Howard Rheingold on networks,
Jill Lepore on the "death of facts," and
Temple Grandin on neurodiversity. • Design and Failure: A session with
Colleen Macklin and John Sharp explored the utility of failure in the creative process based on their book
Iterate. • Digital Rights and Governance: Ito held discussions with Jan Fuller on computer crime and digital evidence, and with
Creative Commons leaders
Ryan Merkley, Jane Park and Diane Peters.
Departure from MIT (2019) In 2019, revelations of Ito's connections with
Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted
sex offender, shed light on the extent of Epstein's monetary gifts to the Media Lab and to Ito's startups outside of MIT. Ito initially wrote an apology but refused to resign, which led to the departure of several prominent Media Lab members, including
Ethan Zuckerman, director of the MIT's
Center for Civic Media, and Media Lab visiting scholar J. Nathan Matias. Calls for Ito to resign were followed by a website (wesupportjoi.org) and letter in support of Ito which appeared in late August signed by more than 100 people including
Lawrence Lessig,
Hiroshi Ishii,
Stewart Brand,
Nicholas Negroponte,
Jonathan Zittrain, and
George M. Church. However, the website was taken down after further details emerged. Ito later admitted to taking $525,000 in funding from Epstein for the lab, and permitting Epstein to invest 1.2 million in Ito's personal investment funds.
Further revelations and leaked emails On September 6, 2019, an article by
Ronan Farrow in
The New Yorker alleged that the lab led by Ito had "a deeper fund-raising relationship with Epstein" than it had acknowledged, and that the lab attempted to conceal the extent of its contacts with him. The article, based on leaked emails between Epstein, Ito and others, alleged that "Ito and other lab employees took numerous steps to keep Epstein's name from being associated with the donations he made or solicited", and that Ito specifically solicited individual donations from Epstein. According to
Harvard Law School professor
Lawrence Lessig the anonymity of the Jeffrey Epstein donations was to avoid "whitewashing" Epstein's reputation and not to conceal the relationship between Ito and Epstein.
Resignations In September 2019, Ito resigned as director of the Media Lab and as an MIT professor shortly after
The New Yorker article. The MacArthur Foundation wrote, "the recent reports of Ito's behavior in
The New Yorker, if true, would not be in keeping with the values of MacArthur. Most importantly, our hearts go out to the girls and women who survived the abuse of Jeffrey Epstein." • He resigned from the board of
The New York Times Company following the Epstein revelations.
The New York Times said "Our newsroom will continue its aggressive reporting on Mr. Epstein, investigating both the individuals and the broader systems of power that enabled him for so many years." • Ito resigned from the board of trustees of the
John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, who wrote, "Jeffrey Epstein's crimes continue to reverberate, most painfully with the girls and women who were his victims. We extend our deepest sympathies to them." • He resigned as the chairman of PureTech Health. The company said that "given circumstances related to the MIT Media Lab, we agreed that Joi's resignation from PureTech was appropriate".
Results of MIT investigation The president of MIT—who had himself signed a letter of thanks to Epstein—requested an "immediate, thorough and independent" investigation into the "extremely serious" and "deeply disturbing allegations about the engagement between individuals at the Media Lab and Jeffrey Epstein". On January 10, 2020, MIT released results of its fact-finding.
Bloomberg reported that president Reif said "senior members of his team 'knew in general terms about Epstein's history—that he had been convicted and had served a sentence and that Joi believed that he had stopped his criminal behavior.'" found that "donations to MIT were driven either by former Media Lab Director Joi Ito or by
Seth Lloyd, a professor of mechanical engineering and physics, not by MIT's central administration". However, the report also states that certain members of MIT's Senior Team "were aware of, and approved, Epstein's donations to support Ito and the Media Lab". Furthermore, the report found that "contrary to certain media reports, neither Epstein nor his foundations was ever coded as 'disqualified' in MIT's donor systems. Further, the code 'disqualified' does not mean that a person or entity is 'blacklisted' or prohibited from donating to the institute. Rather, the term 'disqualified' is a database code for any donor who previously donated to MIT but presently is dormant or is no longer interested in giving to MIT." The report's executive summary ends with the finding that "since MIT had no policy or processes for handling controversial donors in place at the time, the decision to accept Epstein's post-conviction donations cannot be judged to be a policy violation. But it is clear that the decision was the result of collective and significant errors in judgment that resulted in serious damage to the MIT community." ==Later career==