In the Media

Prof. Sherry Turkle joins The Boston Globe’s Anna Kusmer, host of the “Say More” podcast, to discuss how AI chatbots can significantly deskill school-aged children, as detailed in her latest book, “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines.” “People in the thick of this know it is not good for children, it’s a deskilling,” says Turkle. “If your chatbot reads for you, you don’t learn to read, you learn to listen to a podcast about a book, if your chatbot writes for you, you don’t learn to think, because thinking is writing, you learn to sort of edit your chatbots ideas: you learn to prompt.”  

Using satellite data, graduate student Caroline Needell and her colleagues found that the risk of runaway collapse in tall ice cliffs “depends on two main factors: how steeply the sea floor beneath the glacial ice deepens, and how quickly the ice flows seawards,” writes Marissa Grunes for New Scientist. “This idea has been suggested by idealized mathematical models, but had never been systematically measured in real glaciers,” notes Grunes. “The key question, says Needell, is whether thinning [from runway collapse] can outcompete rapid ice loss, restabilizing the glacier. Her study suggests that it might.”  

Washington Post reporter Ariana Eunjung Cha spotlights Prof. Pattie Maes’ research at the intersection of AI and memory, including her wearable AI devices designed to assist older adults that “capture pieces of everyday experience and make them retrievable later.” Maes’ research “takes on particular urgency for people with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, diseases defined by memory loss that can rob a person’s ability to navigate everyday life independently,” writes Eunjung Cha.  

Writing for Nature, Deputy Editorial Director Maia Weinstock honors the life and legacy of the late Margaret Hamilton, a pioneer of the software engineering field, who, at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab, led the team that wrote and tested software for the Apollo Guidance Computer onboard Apollo 11. Hamilton’s story “was also my inspiration for one of the vignettes in a Lego set that I created in 2016, featuring Hamilton and several other women in NASA history,” writes Weinstock. “She continued work at [her Universal Systems Language company] Hamilton Technologies well into her 80s, never failing to inspire me and countless others with her tenacity, humour, warmth and childlike wonder.”

Prof. Daron Acemoglu joins CNBC’s “Closing Bell” to discuss how AI could cause mass job displacement due to companies deploying rapidly advancing technologies. “AI’s capabilities are real and powerful, but human jobs are also complex. I don’t think you want AI to take over air traffic controller jobs right now; you don’t want AI to do CEO jobs,” says Acemoglu. “What we are seeing when these models escape their sandboxes and create havoc—it's not that they are necessarily super intelligent, it is that they don’t have judgement and they are optimized for certain narrow metrics and when you let them loose, they are going to do lots of unforeseeable things. You don’t want that in many jobs.”  

Maxime Cohen PhD ‘15 speaks to Forbes’ Karl Moore about his latest book “Pricing in the Age of AI,” that explores how AI is transforming pricing decisions for businesses, consumers and society. “We may be entering an era of agent-to-agent commerce, in which AI systems negotiate directly with one another on behalf of consumers and businesses,” says Cohen. “This could fundamentally reshape how prices are determined and how transactions take place.” 

On The New York Times’ “Ezra Klein Show,” Prof. Sherry Turkle shares her insights on humans seeking companionship with AI chatbots, detailed in her latest book, “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines.” In relationships with chatbots, “on the one hand, people start to see the chatbots more like people,” says Turkle. “But I think, maybe more significantly, people start to be disappointed with people when they don’t behave like chatbots. They start to think of themselves as if they were computers.”  

MIT researchers have developed an AI system “that not only minimizes forecasting errors, but learns from its inevitable mistakes through a method called postprocessing,” writes reporter Andrew Paul for Popular Science. “Their AI postprocessing integration blew the existing forecasting models out of the water,” notes Paul. “Such massive improvements could soon help the farmers and energy providers who already rely on subseasonal forecasts, but the benefits may even save lives.” 

In an opinion piece for The Boston Globe, graduate student Jonah Prousky shares his observations that students who use AI minimally, or not at all, for their writing, tend to score higher on their written work. “In this environment, where a professor or teaching assistant reads dozens of essays, one after another, AI-generated writing is not only easy to detect but can be terribly monotonous to read,” writes Prousky. “It’s the students who sound most like themselves, by contrast, who delight all the more.”  

Research led by Principal Research Scientist Neil Thompson suggests that AI is likely to be upend theoretical scientific fields within a few years, writes Wired’s Will Knight. “As with math, Thompson says, we should expect advances in other areas to have both positive and negative effects,” writes Knight. “He notes that theoretical advances sometimes drive practical advances in science and suggests that greater use of AI may mean that more progress happens this way.” 

MIT researchers have developed the Probabilistic Bias Correction (PBC) tool, which “uses machine learning to identify systematic bias in a model and make corrections” to improve weather forecasts, reports The Verge’s Justine Calma. “The researchers found that PBC improved the accuracy of a leading physics-based weather model by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) for 98 percent of precipitation and 92 percent of temperature targets,” notes Calma. “The machine learning framework also doubled the accuracy of ECMWF’s new AI forecasting system in the study’s analysis.” 

Gizmodo’s Ellyn Lapointe spotlights the Probabilistic Bias Correction (PBC) tool developed by MIT researchers to “correct systemic errors in forecast models and improve the accuracy of their subseasonal outlooks.” “Extreme weather has the largest impact on our society and improved forecasts of these events can yield large societal benefits,” says Research Scientist Judah Cohen. “Interestingly, previous bias correction schemes actually made forecasts of extreme weather worse, and our model showed clear improvement of extreme weather forecasts.”  

Prof. Behnaz Farahi’s “Ocean of Dreams,” an interactive art installation currently on display in Kendall Square that features submissions from more than 400 international participants, is featured by Dezeen reporter Ben Dreith. “For me, design is ultimately a way of asking: what could be otherwise, and how might we help bring that possibility into being,” says Farahi. “That is also how I think about ‘Ocean of Dreams,’ as a space for collectively imagining and designing possible futures.”  

MIT startup LNK Energies has created a system to efficiently convert heavy-duty trucks from diesel to hydrogen, “slashing pollution and costs while shielding operators from the price spikes that result from geopolitical instability,” writes Tim De Chant for TechCrunch. “A lot of the reactors that LOHC (Liquid organic hydrogen carriers) companies have today are really large. They’re about the size of a shipping container,” says Alexis Huynh ‘24, cofounder of LNK. “We have shrunk that basically to the size of a mini fridge.” 

MIT spinout Cambridge Heavy Industries is developing a desktop-sized fusion reactor that can enable 50 to 80 experiments per day, writes TechCrunch’s Tim De Chant. “Cambridge Heavy’s fusion reactor uses lasers to compress a fuel target, similar to the groundbreaking experiment that proved controlled fusion reactions could produce more power than they consume,” notes De Chant. “But unlike other inertial confinement designs, Cambridge Heavy’s minimizes the number of lasers required to spark fusion.”