Technology and society

Matt Carey MBA '17 and Greg Charvat, a former visiting researcher at the MIT Media Lab, co-founded TeraDAR, a startup that has developed advanced sensor technology that can see through various weather conditions that often confuse existing car sensors, reports Aaron Pressman for The Boston Globe. “We’re going to the last part of the electromagnetic spectrum that no one has ever been able to build a product at before,” explains Carey. “And instead of being able to see through your hand like an X-ray, we can see through rain and snow and dust and fog.”

Prof. Earl Miller speaks with National Geographic reporter Dana Binfet about the impact of increased social media and digital platform use on the brain. “Brain rot is not really rotting our brains,” explains Miller. “It’s constantly creating an environment that our brains are not equipped to deal with—that's the real problem. We’re single-minded creatures and when all this information is coming at us, we want to consume everything and it’s hard to turn off that desire.”

Forbes contributor Bryan Penprase spotlights several MIT initiatives aimed at fostering human-centered AI literacy. Penprase notes that MIT’s Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education (RAISE) initiative “has developed tools for K-12 educators that integrate hands-on AI and robotics experience while emphasizing responsible AI use. MIT’s annual AI Education Summit gathers thought leaders from around the world to discuss AI usage, and MIT’s Advancing Humans with AI (AHA) initiative addresses how humans respond to AI systems as both an engineering challenge and a human design problem.”

Prof. Sara Beery spoke at TED Radio Hour about her work developing Inquire, an AI tool aimed at supercharging ecosystem conservation that is trained on millions of photos captured by citizen scientists, reports GBH. “Under the hood, what we’re doing is we’re developing AI models that can learn and understand similarities between images and scientific language,” explains Beery. 

In a roundup of books aimed at helping people create healthier smartphone habits, New York Times reporter Hope Reese spotlights Prof. Sherry Turkle’s book, “Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age.” Reese writes that, “Using anecdotes from parents, educators and students, Sherry Turkle, a psychologist and sociologist at MIT, shows how the deterioration of conversation leads to loneliness. Setting limits on tech use and protecting spaces for real conversation can stave this off. But face-to-face conversation, she argues, is paramount.”

Wall Street Journal reporters Robbie Whelan and Amrith Ramkumar spotlight Lisa Su '90, SM '91, PhD '94, chair and CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, and her impact leading the company into the center of the global AI race. “At the heart of Su’s strategy is her belief that there is ‘insatiable demand’ for computing power, and that as the market for AI grows, the companies offering the best and most reliable AI infrastructure will thrive,” they write. 

Prof. Hugh Herr speaks with Bloomberg Businessweek Daily host Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec about his work creating bionic limbs that combine human physiology with electromechanics. “I really realized how limited the current prosthetic technology was and I dedicated my life as a young man to really advance the field and enable extraordinary technology that will allow people to do what they want again, to move again and have the bodies that they seek," says Herr. 

A new study by researchers from MIT and elsewhere describes “agentic AI as a ‘new class of systems’ that ‘can plan, act, and learn on their own,’” reports Matt O’Brien for the Associated Press.

Boston 25 reporter Rachel Keller visits the MIT AgeLab and dons the AGNES suit, “an innovative tool designed to simulate the physical and cognitive challenges of aging, allowing users to experience what it feels like to be 80 years old.” Lauren Cerino, a technical associate at the AgeLab, explains that “the intention of the suit is really to help people to think about how can I make the built environment better or how can I make these little changes that can actually make it really much easier for people to navigate spaces.” 

Sloan lecturer Michael Schrage speaks with Fortune reporter Sheryl Estrada about the implications of workslop, “AI-generated content that masquerades as good work but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.” “Ultimately, serious senior management will demand workslop metrics the same way they demand quality metrics,” says Schrage. “They’ll use LLMs to detect slop patterns in computational tasks—essentially, you’ll fight AI with AI.” 

In her forthcoming book, “Phenomenal Moments: Revealing the Hidden Science Around Us,” MIT Research Scientist and science photographer Felice Frankel encourages readers to search for science everywhere, while highlighting the beauty of science. The photographs “challenge readers to deduce the underlying chemical, natural, or physical processes at play.” 

Wired reporter Steven Levy spotlights Research Scientist Sarah Schwettmann PhD '21 and her work investigating the unknown behaviors of AI agents. Schwettmann has co-founded Transluce, a nonprofit interpretability startup “to further study such phenomena,” writes Levy.

At a recent conference, Prof. Sergey Ovchinnikov and his colleagues presented a paper demonstrating how they have used advanced versions of ChatGPT to “generate amino acid sequences that code for biologically active proteins with a structural feature called a four-helix bundle,” reports Jeffrey Brainard for Science. “To Ovchinnikov’s surprise, ChatGPT produced gene sequences without further refinement of his team’s query,” writes Brainard. “Still, the application of ChatGPT to this task needs refinement, Ovchinnikov found. Most of the sequences his team produced did not garner 'high confidence' on a score predicting whether they would form the desired protein structure.” 

Prof. Srini Devadas speaks with Fortune reporter Beatrice Nolan about data and privacy concerns surrounding AI assistants. “The challenge is that if you want the AI assistant to be useful, you need to give it access to your data and your privileges, and if attackers can trick the AI assistant, it is as if you were tricked,” says Devadas. 

Prof. Pat Pataranutaporn speaks with The Guardian reporter Madeleine Aggeler about the impact of AI on human relationships. “If you converse more and more with the AI instead of going to talk to your parents or your friends, the social fabric degrades,” says Pataranutaporn. “You will not develop the skills to go and talk to real humans.”