Sloan Visiting Senior Lecturer Paul McDonagh-Smith speaks with Joe McKendrick of Forbes about the ongoing discussions about AI safety guidelines. “While ensuring safety is crucial, especially for frontier AI models, there is also a need to strike a balance where AI is a catalyst for innovation without putting our organizations and broader society at risk,” explains McDonagh-Smith.
Prof. Anna Stansbury speaks with Soumaya Keynes of the Financial Times podcast “The Economics Show” about her recent research on the class ceiling, which finds that an individual’s family circumstances can hold them back, even if they have earned a PhD. “We should care if people have opportunities to fulfill their talents for reasons of equity and justice. But the other is a very kind of banal economic reason, which is efficiency,” says Stansbury. “If you assume that talent for something is equally distributed, then we should care if people that are talented aren’t getting to fulfill that talent because it’s worse for overall productivity and overall outcomes.”
Profs. Canan Dagdeviren and Hugh Herr speak with CNN discuss their work aimed at empowering patients and doctors. Inspired by her aunt’s experience with breast cancer, Dagdeviren and her students are developing new wearable devices that could help detect cancer at an earlier stage. Says Herr of his work developing prosthetics that can be controlled by the human nervous system: “There will be a point where technology is so sophisticated that we can actually rebuild limbs after amputation that will be as good and, ultimately, they will be better than intact biological limbs.” Herr adds that in the future he hopes “the conversation will not be about human limitation anymore. It will be about human ability and human expression.”
Wired reporter Parker Hall spotlights Lila Snyder SM '96, PhD '98 and her impact as CEO of Bose. Snyder "helped turn a rickety start in the wireless earbud and Bluetooth speaker space into some of the sleekest, best-sounding models on the market," explains Hall. "In a world where management consultants and tech executives are known for stripping companies for parts and raising prices, Snyder and a slimmed-down Bose have maintained the brand’s noise-canceling superiority in the face of stiff competition from Apple, Sony, and others.”
Researchers from MIT and Oxford University has found “social media platforms’ suspensions of accounts may not be rooted in political biases, but rather certain political groups’ tendency to share misinformation,” reports Miranda Nazzaro for The Hill. “Thus, even under politically neutral anti-misinformation polices, political asymmetries in enforcement should be expected,” researchers wrote. “Political imbalance in enforcement need not imply bias on the part of social media companies implementing anti-misinformation polices.”
Prof. Jessika Trancik speaks with BBC reporter Isabelle Gerretsen about the future of electric vehicles and how shifting to EVs can help reduce carbon emissions. Trancik and her research lab developed an online tool, dubbed Carboncounter, that can analyze the climate impact of different vehicles. “A shift to an electric vehicle is one of the single most impactful decisions that someone can make if they want to reduce their own emissions," explains Trancik.
A new working paper by MIT Prof. Antoinette Schoar and Brandeis Prof. Yang Sun explores how different people react to financial advice, reports Robin Wigglesworth for Financial Times. “The results indicate that most people do update their beliefs in the direction of the advice they receive, irrespective of their previous views,” writes Wigglesworth.
Researchers at MIT have found large language models “often struggle to handle more complex problems that require true understanding,” reports Kirimgeray Kirimli for Forbes. “This underscores the need for future versions of LLMs to go beyond just these basic, shared capabilities,” writes Kirimli.
Prof. Daron Acemoglu speaks with Bloomberg reporter Jeran Wittenstein about the current state of AI and the technology’s economic potential. “You need highly reliable information or the ability of these models to faithfully implement certain steps that previously workers were doing,” says Acemoglu of the state of current large language models. “They can do that in a few places with some human supervisory oversight” — like coding — “but in most places they cannot. That’s a reality check for where we are right now."
A new study by MIT scientists proposes that researchers should be able to detect near-flying primordial black holes by measuring the orbit of Mars, reports Darren Orf for Popular Mechanics. The researchers found that “if a primordial black hole passed within a few hundred million miles of the Red Planet, then a few years later, the planet’s orbit would have shifted by the small (but technically detectable) distance of about a meter,” Orf explains.
Researchers at MIT have developed “Future You,” a generative AI chatbot that enables users to speak with potential older versions of themselves, reports Sharon Goldman for Fortune. The tool “uses a large language model and information provided by the user to help young people ‘improve their sense of future self-continuity, a psychological concept that describes how connected a person feels with their future self,’” writes Goldman. “The researchers explained that the tool cautions users that its results are only one potential version of their future self, and they can still change their lives,” writes Goldman.
MIT researchers have found that more workers without college degrees are optimistic about AI and automation initiatives in the workplace, than those workers with a college diploma, reports Rebecca Klar for Bloomberg Law. The study found “27.4% of workers without a college degree estimated that automation will be beneficial for their job security, compared to 23.7% of workers with a college degree,” explains Klar.
Researchers at MIT have found that “60% of workers who work with robotics and AI think they’ll see positive career impacts as a result in terms of productivity, satisfaction, and job safety,” reports Sam Becker for Fast Company.
Writing for Scientific American, MIT Prof. David Rand and University of Pennsylvania postdoctoral fellow Jennifer Allen highlight new challenges in the fight against misinformation. “Combating misbelief is much more complicated—and politically and ethically fraught—than reducing the spread of explicitly false content,” they write. “But this challenge must be bested if we want to solve the ‘misinformation’ problem.”
Researchers at MIT have developed a new method that “enables robots to intuitively identify relevant areas of a scene based on specific tasks,” reports Baba Tamim for Interesting Engineering. “The tech adopts a distinctive strategy to make robots effective and efficient at sorting a cluttered environment, such as finding a specific brand of mustard on a messy kitchen counter,” explains Tamim.