A new study co-authored by Sloan graduate student Anand Shah explores the growing use of AI across the legal system, reports Chris Stokel-Walker for Fast Company. “The pro se share of all civil cases has been 11% for quite some time,” says Shah. “And then in the post-AI world, we see it jumping all the way up to something like 18%.”
In an interview with CNN reporter Madeline Holcombe, Prof. Sherry Turkle shares her views on AI tools and companionship, and how AI chatbots can impact social connection and isolation. “Intimacy requires vulnerability — there is no intimacy without vulnerability,” says Turkle. “What AI offers is connection without vulnerability. You are not getting a sustaining form of intimacy and connection. You are getting a non-nourishing combination that may give the sense of a quick fix, but is not sustaining.”
CBS News reporter Aimee Picchi spotlights Prof. Andrew Lo’s recent comments on using AI for retirement planning. “Lo stressed that it's important to ask critical questions when using AI for retirement advice, such as prompting an AI to say where it might be wrong and to list its assumptions and uncertainties,” writes Picchi.
Prof. Regina Barzilay speaks with WBUR’s Priyanka Dayal McCluskey about her work developing an AI risk detection tool that can analyze mammogram images and help predict risk of breast cancer before it happens or spreads. Barzilay, who describes the tool as a hi-tech weather forecast for breast health, notes that: “We really need to have tools that can help, rather than just staring at an image and trying to guess.”
Sybil, a new AI tool developed by researchers from MIT and Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute, “analyzes a single CT scan and generates a risk score predicting the likelihood of developing lung cancer over a period of up to six years,” reports Ivan Rodriguez for WCVB-TV. “In 2023, researchers reported that Sybil achieved an accuracy rate of 86% to 94% in distinguishing high-risk patients from low-risk patients within a year.”
Cambridge Day reporter Zoe Beketova, a student in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, visits Prof. Xuanhe Zhao’s lab to get a hands-on look at the group’s ultrasound wristband that can map movements of the human body using sound waves, part of the group’s work aimed at changing “how we gather information from inside the body.” Says Zhao: “The mission of my lab is really merging humans with machines and AI. We believe there’s a huge opportunity [with] this interface.”
Fortune reporter Preston Fore spotlights Principal Research Scientist Andrew McAfee’s remarks warning against using AI technologies to replace entry level jobs. “How else are people going to learn to do the job except via on-the-job learning and training apprenticeship?” said McAfee. “That’s how you learn to do difficult knowledge work is by helping somebody who’s good at that with the routine stuff. And when we put too much automation in that too quickly, we lose that apprenticeship ladder.”
Reporting for CNN, Caleb Hellerman spotlights how MIT computer scientists developed an AI program called Sybil that can “‘look’ at a single CT scan and generate a ‘risk score’ corresponding to the likelihood of the person developing cancer over any period up to six years.”
Prof. Daron Acemoglu joins Slate’s “Money Talks” podcast to explain his research into pro-worker technologies and how we can not only avoid the AI job apocalypse but also improve workers’ lives by shifting the goal of AI from automation to collaboration. “Artificial intelligence is quite different than human intelligence,” says Acemoglu. “And when two things are different, a natural way to combine them is in a complimentary way.”
Prof. Xuanhe Zhao speaks with Tech Briefs reporter Andrew Corselli about his team’s work developing an ultrasound wristband that precisely tracks a wearer’s hand movements in real time and can communicate device these motions to a robot or a virtual environment. “For the future of human society, humanized robots will do lots of different work for us. For that work, we need a dexterous robotic hand,” explains Zhao. “We believe this ultrasound wristband, based on variable imaging, could be the future of really knowing the human hand motions.”
President Emeritus L. Rafael Reif writes for The Boston Globe that with the advent of transformative AI, there is an urgent need for “a bilateral conversation between Washington and Beijing, focused on the shared dangers these technologies pose to each nation and to global stability. Both governments must work toward agreed guardrails, defining not just how this technology should be used but where it must never be applied. Red lines need to be defined, established, and agreed upon.”
Profs. Daron Acemoglu and David Autor join Jon Stewart on his podcast, “The Weekly Show” to discuss what the future might look like for American workers and the importance of creating guardrails and policies that help ensure AI can be integrated in way that is positive for workers. “There’s constructive ways to steer. We don't need to shut it down. We don't need to regulate it to death so it can't move. The U.S. is innovative, and that's great. We have a lot to be proud of, in that we have led this technology. We're building it out quickly. It's valuable,” says Autor. “We need to steer it. Just left to its own…it’s not going to be pro-worker.”
In discussion with Deni Ellis Bechard for Scientific American, Prof. Emeritus Rodney Brooks shares his thoughts on a robot that ran a half marathon faster than a human. “When you see a performance of an AI system or a robot on one thing, that fools us into thinking that it has the same general competence as a human,” says Brooks. “And that’s a mistake people make.”
Prof. Marzyeh Ghassemi speaks with Mark Herz, host of GBH Morning Edition, about the potential benefits and issues associated with using AI in medicine. “Where I really see a lot of fantastic opportunity is identifying spaces where humans don’t have a fundamental capacity, like early breast cancer detection where it’s a sub-clinical presentation,” says Ghassemi. “These are spaces where humans cannot do or have been proven not to be good at a very specific clinical task. And there, AI can really help close the gap.”
Prof. Thomas Malone and his colleagues at MIT Sloan have developed a way to analyze work, which may help predict which jobs are likely most vulnerable to AI. The researchers found that “AI mainly threatens workers who manage information. But not all of them,” writes Hiawatha Bray for The Boston Globe. “Malone noted that some industries demand human empathy, a sense of ethics, and a knack for teamwork. That’s why he thinks health care jobs are relatively safe.”