The Economist reporter Rachel Lloyd predicts a “distinct change” in topics for bestselling books in 2024. Lloyd predicts artificial intelligence will take a lead, spotlighting “The Heart and Chip: Our Bright Future with Robots,” by Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, as a leading example of the shift.
Prof. David Rand speaks with Wall Street Journal reporter Christopher Mims about the impact of generative AI on the spread of misinformation. “When you show people deepfakes and generative AI, a lot of times they come out of the experiment saying, ‘I just don’t trust anything anymore,’” says Rand.
Augmental, an MIT spinoff, has created MouthPad, a tongue-controlled, computer mouse pad designed for people with disabilities, reports Zoya Hasan and Alex York for Forbes. The device is a “hands-free, custom fit mouthpiece for device control,” explains Hasan and York.
Prof. Nick Montfort speaks with Inside Higher Ed reporter Lauren Coffey about the use of AI tools in art and education. “The primary concern should be how can we provide new education, how can we inform students, artists, instructors,” says Montfort. “How can we, not so much bolt policies or create guardrails, but how can we help them understand new technologies better and their implications?”
Los Angeles Times reporter Brian Merchant spotlights Joy Buolamwini PhD '22 and her new book, “Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What is Human in a World of Machines.” “Buolamwini’s book recounts her journey to become one of the nation’s preeminent scholars and critics of artificial intelligence — she recently advised President Biden before the release of his executive order on AI — and offers readers a compelling, digestible guide to some of the most pressing issues in the field,” writes Merchant.
Joy Buolamwini PhD '22 speaks with Brian Bergstein of The Boston Globe’s “Say More” podcast about her academic and professional career studying bias in AI. “As I learned more and also became familiar with the negative impacts of things like facial recognition technologies, it wasn’t just the call to say let’s make systems more accurate but a call to say let’s reexamine the ways in which we create AI in the first place and let’s reexamine our measures of progress because so far they have been misleading,” says Buolamwini
Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with Yahoo! Finance Live host Julie Hyman about President Biden’s executive order on artificial intelligence regulation. “This is big, it's bold, it's broad,” says Aral. “It has a number of provisions. It has provisions for safety, for privacy, for equity, for workers, for competition and innovation, and leadership abroad. And it really targets those foundation models, the big AI companies in terms of their safety and security standards.”
Ashley Smart, associate director of the Knight Science Journalism Program, writes for Undark about the impact of commercialized genetic tests on research involving new genetic links. “Even among some researchers who are optimistic about using polygenic scores to screen for physical health conditions, there is one emerging application of polygenic scores that makes them uneasy: the prediction of risks for depression and other psychiatric conditions,” writes Smart.
MIT researchers have designed a wearable ultrasound device that could help make breast cancer screening more accessible, reports Carrie Arnold for National Geographic. “Early detection is the key for survival,” says Prof. Canan Dagdeviren. “Our humble calculation shows that this technology has the potential to save 12 million lives per year globally.”
Joy Buolamwini PhD '22 writes for The Boston Globe about her experience uncovering bias in artificial intelligence through her academic and professional career. “I critique AI from a place of having been enamored with its promise, as an engineer more eager to work with machines than with people at times, as an aspiring academic turned into an accidental advocate, and also as an artist awakened to the power of the personal when addressing the seemingly technical,” writes Buolamwini. “The option to say no, the option to halt a project, the option to admit to the creation of dangerous and harmful though well-intentioned tools must always be on the table.”
Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have developed a transparency index used to assess 10 key AI foundation models, reports Ryan Heath for Axios. Heath writes that the researchers emphasized that “unless AI companies are more forthcoming about the inner workings, training data and impacts of their most advanced tools, users will never be able to fully understand the risks associated with AI, and experts will never be able to mitigate them.”
Research scientist Nataliya Kosmyna speaks with The World host Chris Harland-Dunaway about the science behind using non-invasive brain scans and artificial intelligence to understand people’s different thoughts and mental images.
Researchers at MIT have designed “a wearable ultrasound scanner that could be used at home to detect breast tumors earlier,” reports Simon Makin for Scientific American. “The researchers incorporated the scanner into a flexible, honeycombed 3-D-printed patch that can be fixed into a bra,” explains Makin. “The wearer moves the scanner among six different positions on the breast, where it snaps into place with magnets, allowing reproducible scanning of the whole breast.”
Writing for The Atlantic, Prof. Deb Roy makes the case that “new kinds of social networks can be designed for constructive communication—for listening, dialogue, deliberation, and mediation—and they can actually work.” Roy adds: “We can and should create social networks designed for public discourse that prioritize inclusion, where underheard voices and perspectives can flourish, and where people take and offer disagreement in good faith.”
Tom Davenport, a visiting scholar at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, writes for Forbes about how organizations are approaching generative AI. “If organizations are to succeed with generative AI, they need to increase the focus on data preparation for it, which is a primary prerequisite for success,” writes Davenport.