Prof. Jonathan Gruber speaks with Marketplace reporter Matt Levin about the potential impact of raising the retirement age in the United States. Gruber suggests a new system where retirement age would vary by income. “People who are sufficiently high income, should be expected to work longer and get less in the system,” says Gruber. “People with physically demanding jobs and low income should be able to retire earlier.”
Prof. Yossi Sheffi, director of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, discusses the potential impacts of the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore on shipping, logistics and the economy. “Many other ports are not equipped to handle the type of commodities that go to Baltimore,” Sheffi explains.
Prof. Gregory Rutledge speaks with The Ringer reporter Claire McNear about the science behind nanofibers and whether it's possible to create ultrathin and ultrastrong nanofibers that are invisible to the human eye, as shown in the science fiction series “3 Body Problem.” Rutledge explains that: “Given that a human hair is about 50 micrometers in diameter, a fiber 100 times smaller would be about 500 nanometers in diameter. Such fibers are routinely made by electrospinning, as well as by a couple of other technologies. Metal wires can also be drawn that small.”
MIT researchers have developed a new technique that uses a large language model to allow robots to self-correct after making a mistake, reports Brian Heater for TechCrunch. “Researchers behind the study note that while imitation learning (learning to do a task through observation) is popular in the world of home robotics, it often can’t account for the countless small environmental variations that can interfere with regular operation, thus requiring a system to restart from square one,” writes Heater. “The new research addresses this, in part, by breaking demonstrations into smaller subsets."
A number of MIT faculty and alumni – including Prof. Daniela Rus, Prof. Regina Barzilay, Research Affiliate Haddad Habib, Research Scientist Lex Fridman, Marc Raibert PhD '77, former Postdoc Rana El Kaliouby and Ray Kurzweil '70 – have been named key figures “at the forefront of Boston’s AI revolution,” reports Wyndham Lewis for Boston Magazine. These researchers are “driving progress and reshaping the way we live,” writes Lewis.
Prof. Long Ju and his colleagues observed the fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect (FQAHE) when five layers of graphene were sandwiched between sheets of boron nitride, reports Dan Garisto for Nature. The findings are, “capturing physicists’ imagination because they are fundamentally new discoveries about how electrons behave,” writes Garisto.
Ms. Magazine reporter Kalindi Vora spotlights Prof. Emerita Evelyn Fox Keller and the legacy of her work in the field of science. “Through her work, [Keller] showed that objectivity, the key value of the sciences, is in fact always partially subjective,” writes Vora. “Her legacy demonstrates that diversifying the sciences will improve research and discovery.”
In an article for Forbes, Sloan Research Scientist Ranjan Pal and Prof. Bodhibrata Nag of the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta highlight the risks associated with the rise of Internet of things-driven smart cities and homes. “Unlike traditional catastrophic bond markets, where the (natural) catastrophe does not affect financial stability, a cyber-catastrophe can affect financial stability,” they write. “Hence, more information is needed by bond writing parties to screen cyber-risk exposure to guarantee no threat to financial stability.”
Prof. David Autor speaks with Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast hosts Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway about how AI could be leveraged to improve inequality, emphasizing the policy choices governments will need to make to ensure the technology is beneficial to humans. “Automation is not the primary source of how innovation improves our lives,” says Autor. “Many of the things we do with new tools is create new capabilities that we didn’t previously have.”
Prof. David Autor and Prof. Daron Acemoglu speak with New York Times columnist Peter Coy about the impact of AI on the workforce. Acemoglu and Autor are “optimistic about a continuing role for people in the labor market,” writes Coy. “An upper bound of the fraction of jobs that would be affected by A.I. and computer vision technologies within the next 10 years is less than 10 percent,” says Acemoglu.
MIT researchers have found that “when an AI tool for radiologists produced a wrong answer, doctors were more likely to come to the wrong conclusion in their diagnoses,” report Daniel Payne, Carmen Paun, Ruth Reader and Erin Schumaker for Politico. “The study explored the findings of 140 radiologists using AI to make diagnoses based on chest X-rays,” they write. “How AI affected care wasn’t dependent on the doctors’ levels of experience, specialty or performance. And lower-performing radiologists didn’t benefit more from AI assistance than their peers.”
Alumnus Benjamin Rapoport co-founded Precision Neuroscience, a brain-computer interface company, that is developing technology that will allow “paralyzed patients the ability to operate a computer with their thoughts,” reports Jo Craven McGinty for The Wall Street Journal. “In order to be a citizen of the world in 2024, to communicate with loved ones, to make a living, the ability to work with a digital system is indispensable,” says Rapoport. “To operate a word processor is totally transformative.”
Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have isolated a “protein in human sweat that protects against Lyme disease,” reports Matthew Rozsa for Salon. The researchers believe that if “properly harnessed the protein could form the basis of skin creams that either prevent the disease or treat especially persistent infections,” writes Rosza.
A celebration in Killian Hall featured recent works composed by Professor Peter Child and honored the musician as he prepares to retire after 37 years of teaching and composing at MIT, writes Boston Musical Intelligencer reporter Mark DeVoto. “All of these very different kinds of music demonstrated the protean spirit of Peter Child, showing him as one of the most interesting and heartily youthful composers anywhere in America today,” writes DeVoto.
Research Scientists Karthik Srinivasan and Robert Ajemian speak with The Economist’s Babbage podcast about the role of big data and specialized computer chips in the development of artificial intelligence. “I think right now, actually, the goal should be just to harness big data as much as we can,” says Ajemian. “It’s kind of this new tool, a new toy, that humanity has to play with and obviously we have to play with it responsibly. The architectures that they built today are not that different than the ones that were built in the 60s and the 70s and the 80s. The difference is back then they did not have big data and tremendous compute."