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.”
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.
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.
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."
The MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics (CTL) topped the list of Supply Chain Digital’s best places to pursue an education in supply chain logistics and management, reports Tom Chapman. “Over the years, MIT CTL has made significant contributions to supply chain and logistics and has helped numerous companies gain a competitive advantage thanks to its cutting-edge research,” writes Chapman.
Using microwave plasma technology developed at MIT, 6K inc., is turning metals “including scrap, into high-performance materials for various applications,” reports Alex Pasternack for Fast Company. “The process produces no salt or liquid waste, uses just 10% of the water and half of the energy of conventional processes, and reduces costs by half,” writes Pasternack. “Its technique can also precisely control the composition and structure of materials at the atomic level.”
Radia, an energy startup founded by Mark Lundstrom '91, SM '93, MBA '93, has developed the “Windrunner,” an airplane designed to deliver 300-foot-blades directly to wind farms, reports Maureen O’Hare for CNN. The plane will “help the world meet its decarbonization targets, it’ll use sustainable aviation fuel and need only a simple packed-dirt or gravel runway to land on,” writes O’Hare.
Boston Magazine spotlights MIT’s leading role in the AI revolution in the Greater Boston area. “With a $2 million grant from the Department of Defense, MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab combines with a new research group, Project MAC, to create what’s now known as the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Over the next three years, researchers lead groundbreaking machine-learning projects such as the creation of Eliza, a psychotherapy-based computer program that could process languages and establish emotional connections with users (a primordial chatbot, essentially).”
Boston Globe reporter Aaron Pressman spotlights the Perkins School for the Blind Hackathon held at MIT. “The students divided into 10 teams, named after colors, and picked one of eight challenges Perkins had crafted, such as assisting a blind person to navigate an indoor space or to pick up non-verbal cues in video conference conversations,” writes Pressman. “But before writing a line of code, the teams met with people with a disability relevant to the challenge they had selected.”
Washington Post columnist Eduardo Porter spotlights various MIT research efforts aimed at ensuring that AI is used to empower human workers rather than replace them. Prof. David Autor notes: “AI, if used well, can assist with restoring the middle-skill, middle-class heart of the U.S. labor market that has been hollowed out by automation and globalization.”
Boston.com reporter Natalie Gale spotlights the upcoming MIT Sustainability Summit, which will be held this year on April 26. The event, called ‘Systems Change,’ “aims to help bridge the ‘collaboration gap’ on climate solutions, bringing together ideas from different sectors like science, business, and policy making speed up solutions,” writes Gale.