Technology and society

Financial Times reporter Clive Cookson details how the late Margaret Hamilton engineered code that would play a crucial role in achieving the first moon landing, at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab. When Apollo 11’s onboard computer flashed alarms minutes from landing on the moon, “Hamilton and colleagues had engineered the software to dump non-essential background tasks under those circumstances and prioritize procedures needed for the landing,” writes Cookson. “NASA controllers in Houston trusted the software, so they decided not to abort the mission, allowing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to touch down safely in their Eagle module.”  

Fast Company’s Adele Peters highlights Firma Power, a clean energy developer co-founded by MIT alumni aimed at working with data centers to use clean alternatives to gas power. “We started the company with the hypothesis that despite the fact that 98% of what’s in the queue is wind, solar and storage, that’s not getting tapped as the default path to power for large loads—so there’s got to be some market frictions and barriers there,” says Jesse Jenkins SM ’14, PhD ’18.  

Prof. Emilio Castilla discusses the factors companies must consider when deploying AI to help in the hiring process, in an article by USA Today’s Greta Reich. “We should evaluate not only whether the algorithm predicts historical hiring decisions, but whether it helps identify candidates who subsequently perform well in the job,” writes Castilla. “The most exciting possibility is not simply that AI might help us find the best talent more efficiently. It is that AI might help us recognize talent that our traditional hiring practices have systematically overlooked.”  

Research Affiliate Paul Kedrosky joins The New York Times’ “The Ezra Klein Show” to discuss how the development of AI is creating an economic bubble, where asset prices are detached from economic reality. “We’re building it [AI] out like we were the railroads, like we were electrification, like we were the canals, like we were the interstate highways. And every one of those moments has led to overbuild,” says Kedrosky. “The reality is we’ve never seen a general-purpose technology that had such broad applicability, was adopted so quickly and was repricing labor at the same time.”  

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.” 

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.”  

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.”

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.” 

Prof. Ankur Moitra and Prof. John Urschel share their thoughts with Forbes’ Alex Knapp about OpenAI releasing more than 700 math preprint papers online. “We’re used to landmark results being accompanied by new insights and theories,” writes Moitra. “But these feel different. The claims are spectacular, the papers are incomprehensible and there’s no punchline in sight that explains why the mysteries suddenly unraveled.” Adds Urschel: “It’s obvious that how we do and evaluate mathematics is going to have to change. What I think is constant is the fundamental idea of understanding that underpins our profession. And I’m excited to learn from these breakthroughs.” 

Prof. Pat Pataranutaporn and graduate student Manuel Cherep speak to the Scientific American’s Mary Randolph about companies creating AI agents to assist users in personal tasks. “We have this narrative crisis about AI right now. There’s two opposite visions of the future, and while people worry about AI,” says Pataranutaporn, “there’s this cute AI tool that’s being released.” 

“Groundbreaking computer scientist” Margaret Hamilton, who at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab “led the team that created the onboard flight software for NASA’s moon-bound Apollo program and later in life was celebrated as a powerful symbol of women in technology,” has died at 90, writes Associated Press reporter Jamie Stengle. Hamilton “was very much a mathematician and into the abstraction of how to turn thought into software,” notes her daughter, Lauren. 

MassLive’s Liesel Nygard spotlights the late Margaret Hamilton, “a pioneering computer scientist who helped establish the field of software engineering and led the MIT team that developed the onboard flight software for NASA’s Apollo moon missions.” Nygard writes, “Thanks to priority-driven ‘defensive’ software [in the lunar module’s computers] engineered by Hamilton and her team, the system automatically shut down unnecessary background tasks to focus on the landing, avoiding an emergency abort [of the Apollo 11 mission].”  

The Washington Post’s Juno Carmel details how the late Margaret Hamilton “developed early computer software that helped pave the way for the digital world as we know it today” and led the team at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab that programmed the alarm code that played a crucial role in the Apollo 11 mission. Hamilton “was the lead developer for the software that powered the Apollo guidance computer, which weighed 70 pounds but had only 72 kilobytes of memory, a fraction of today’s smartphones,” notes Carmel. 

Margaret Hamilton, “best known for her major contributions to the Apollo missions” at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab, “died on Sept. 30 at age 90, leaving behind a trailblazing legacy of problem-solving and entrepreneurship that paved the way for a new branch of computer science and engineering,” writes reporter Margherita Bassi for Smithsonian Magazine. Hamilton’s “coding foresight and prowess really made that mission a success,” says Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s Andrew Meade McGee. “She created the logical software basis for many of the critical systems we use to maintain our infrastructure today, and that silently power today’s modern aerospace world.” 

Margaret Hamilton, who developed the software that helped the Apollo 11 mission land safely on the moon and “whose historic accomplishments focused attention on the work of software engineers,” died on Sept. 30, reports Bryan Marquard for The Boston Globe. “She gave me, from the get-go, this notion that I could do anything, that there were absolutely no gender barriers,” says Hamilton’s daughter, Lauren. Hamilton’s life and work conveyed to her great-granddaughters “that very clear idea that they could have whatever future they wanted to create for themselves.”