Washington Post reporter Kevin Schaul examines the impact of AI on a number of fields, highlighting a recent study co-authored by graduate student Anand Shah that found that over the past few years there appears to have been an increase in self-represented and AI-generated legal filings. “Every system that has decreased cost to entry from AI should expect increased demand,” says Shah.
Joseph Coughlin, director of the MIT AgeLab, joins NBC News Now hosts Kate Snow and Zinhle Essamuah to discuss how Americans can prepare for retirement, reviewing several questions that can help individuals prepare for a longer life. “Most of us start thinking about retirement as somewhere between health and wealth, and that’s not incorrect, but it’s incomplete,” says Coughlin.
Prof. William Oliver speaks with Scientific American reporter Adam Becker about the future of quantum computing. “Quantum computing is real, it’s happening, and it’s going to take time,” Oliver says. “It’s going to take engineering, and there’s still science to do as well. It’s not all buttoned up.” He adds that, in the future, we will be using quantum computers "to better understand, from a scientific standpoint, the world around us.”
Prof. Richard Binzel shares his insights into the recently discovered school-bus sized asteroid that will fly by Earth next week with CNN reporter Jacopo Prisco. “2026JH2 will pass safely by the Earth,” said Binzel. “This is actually a rather normal occurrence, car-sized objects pass between the Earth and the Moon every week. At the size of a school bus, these pass through our neighborhood several times per year. We are only recently developing surveys that are sensitive enough to see them.”
In an effort to defend medical devices against quantum attacks, MIT researchers have engineered an ultra-efficient microchip that can protect wireless biomedical devices, such as insulin pumps and pacemakers, reports Katie Hunt for CNN. The microchip, which is around the size of an extremely fine needle tip, “includes built-in protection needed for post-quantum cybersecurity. The device achieved between 20 and 60 times higher energy efficiency than other post-quantum security techniques.”
A study by MIT scientists uncovered the culprit in the deep-sea mystery of what was reducing the ocean’s carbon-trapping capacity: dense microbe ‘cities’ living inside marine snow (slowly sinking particles of fish poop and other debris), reports Scientific American reporter Damien Pine. “Ultimately everything that’s happening at these microscales—that’s really what’s terraforming our planet,” explains Prof. Andrew Babbin.
Prof. Taha Choukhmane co-authored a new study examining how Americans are using AI in their financial planning and found that “AI consistently gave better advice to people who asked better questions,” reports Daniel de Visé for USA Today. “It might be that AI is going to be a little more useful for people who already know a little bit about finance and financial literacy,” Choukhmane explains.
Writing for Bloomberg, Prof. Paul Osterman examines the rising use of contractors, freelancers and gig-workers by employers around the country. “While not all workers need to be forced into standard employment, they deserve some minimum level of protection and benefits—that includes gig workers and freelancers, who often don’t have any,” Osterman notes. “Workers need not pay a high price so employers can secure the flexibility they need.”
Prof. Daniel Anderson speaks with Mandy Letterii at Medscape about his development of an implantable device for people with diabetes that can dispense islet cells directly into the body to manage blood sugar, which would eliminate the need for insulin injections. “We want to allow people to forget that they have diabetes,” says Anderson. “We’re not there yet, but that’s certainly what we hope to achieve.”
Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with Fast Company reporter Natalie Nixon about the risks of offloading creative work to AI systems. In one study, Aral and his colleagues found that with more creative work outsourced to AI, there was a resulting “slow homogenization of output that occurs when AI, trained on the same publicly available internet, starts flattening the edges that make creative work distinctive.” In another study, Aral’s team found, “cognitive offloading to AI (the act of outsourcing tasks you could do yourself) erodes the very skills you’re handing off.”
Sloan Visiting Prof. Gilbert Metcalf joins Marketplace to discuss whether suspending the gas tax could help consumers with rising prices. Metcalf notes that halting the tax likely won’t help, as gas prices have already risen by 40% or higher in some parts of the country. He also notes pausing the tax would hurt the country’s deficit, explaining that “every dollar that we take away in gas tax revenue means that's another dollar we have to spend out of the general budget” for infrastructure.
Prof. Asu Ozdaglar, head of EECS and deputy dean of academics for the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, speaks with Kai Ryssdal of Marketplace about how MIT is preparing its students for the era of AI by teaching foundational skills that will enable them to find jobs in a variety of different sectors. The new Artificial Intelligence + Decision Making major (AI+D) teaches students about the “foundations of how to use this intelligence for enhancing human experience, human work, human education, all of those domains, so that no matter how the technology changes, these students can adapt their skills to the new set of tools and developments.”
In an article for Forbes, Senior Lecturer Guadalupe Hayes-Mota '08 MS '16, MBA '16 explores how “AI is now embedded in the critical path of drug discovery, and it is making consequential decisions at a speed and scale that existing governance structures were simply not designed to handle.” Hayes-Mota emphasizes: “The goal is to ensure that as AI accelerates the machine of drug development, we have deliberate mechanisms for human accountability threaded through every critical junction.”
New York Times reporters Gina Kolata and Rebecca Robbins highlight how university researchers at MIT and Harvard laid the groundwork for the development of a new treatment for pancreatic cancer that “could wind up being the most significant advance in cancer treatment in 15 years, since the arrival of immunotherapy.” They write: “In 1982, Robert Weinberg, a scientist at MIT, made one of the seminal discoveries about how RAS genes fuel some cancers.”
Writing for MassLive, Scott Kirsner highlights Gander Robotics, a startup co-founded by Sloan graduate student Michael Autery, that is “developing a torpedo-like device that is light enough to be tossed over the side of a ship — and designed to find a person in the water.” Autery, who served 15 years in the U.S. Navy, first pitched the idea for an “autonomous rescue swimmer” as part of an MIT entrepreneurship competition and notes: “if I had the same idea in a different place at the same time, I’m not sure it would’ve played out the same way. Cambridge is this very rich ecosystem for entrepreneurship.”