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Prof. Eric Klopfer, co-chair of MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training, speaks with Newsweek’s Amanda Greenwood and Hollie Silverman about homework in an era of AI. “Students need experience to understand and regulate their AI behaviors,” says Klopfer. “They need to learn how it can augment, rather than replace, their learning, and decide how to use it.”
Prof. Charles Stewart III, director of MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab, speaks to NPR’s “Morning Edition” about the surge in early voting among Americans in the midterm elections. The surge is reflecting “the enthusiasm of voters, but also, I think it has to be understood that a lot of this activity is also generated by the campaigns, getting out and motivating their voters to get to the polls or to return their mail-in-ballots,” says Stewart. “The political science research suggests that people who are voting early would have voted on Election Day had that mode not been available to them.”
The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus details how Morris Chang ’52, SM ’53 founded the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), “one of the most valuable tech companies globally” that “makes almost all of the world’s advanced [computer] chips.” “Chang proposed a semiconductor ‘foundry,’ which would do for pricey chips what its predecessors had done for cheap junk. At the time, however, the market didn’t exist,” writes Lewis-Kraus. “By the end of TSMC’s first decade, the company was bringing in a billion dollars in annual revenue.”
Prof. Charles Stewart III, director of MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab, speaks with Craig LeMoult during GBH’s “Morning Edition” about the electoral environment in Massachusetts. “I am somebody who thinks that activists tend to overestimate the importance and the effects of voting reforms,” says Stewart. “But having said that, I think that Massachusetts needs something to shake it up from the current electoral environment that it has.”
In The Boston Globe’s “Starting Point Newsletter,” reporter Anna Kusmer features Prof. Sherry Turkle’s insights from her latest book “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines,” including the risks that AI companionship poses to school-aged children. “Children are bringing the world inside; they’re bringing the people around them inside them to create an inner life,” says Turkle. “And when you talk to a chatbot, there is nothing to bring inside. There is no caring person.”
In an interview with Wired’s Steven Levy, Prof. Sherry Turkle discusses how she witnessed chatbots with human-like features becoming “dangerously enmeshed” with people, during research for her latest book “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines.” “In every serious interview I do, people invoke this myth about practice—that you use chatbots to practice for talking to your boss, your lover, your teacher,” says Turkle. “But when you’re bathing in the warm soup of total acceptance, talking to chatbots becomes the endgame.”
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.”
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.”
At the STAT Summit, President Sally Kornbluth joined Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals, for a panel moderated by STAT’s Anil Oza. During the conversation, Kornbluth emphasized the importance of curiosity-driven research and education at institutions like MIT, highlighting MIT for America, a new initiative aimed at ensuring learners and educators from Kindergarten through community college across the country have access to STEM education. “We want to both meet people where they are, give their kids the opportunity, and also make them understand us as people who care about their communities,” says Kornbluth.
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.”
NPR’s Greg Rosalsky explains how Robert Hall PhD ’67 and Michael Woodford PhD ’83, winners of the 2026 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, were honored for their work helping to lay the groundwork for New Keynesian economics, taking a fresh scoop of the field. “Hall and Woodford helped rebuild macroeconomics around the decisions of individual people and businesses. Hall broke new ground in understanding how people's expectations about the future shape their spending today. Woodford built on that work, developing a framework that combined forward-looking spending decisions with sticky prices.”
Forbes’ Michael T. Nietzel spotlights Robert Hall PhD ’67 and Michael Woodford PhD ’83, who were awarded the 2026 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for their work on economic stabilization policies. “The work of Hall and Woodford has proved beneficial for managing economic shocks like those from the pandemic and the energy crises of recent years,” Nietzel writes. “While recessions and episodes of high inflation have not disappeared, they tend to be less long-lasting.”
Robert Hall PhD ’67 and Michael Woodford PhD ’83 have won the 2026 Nobel economics prize for their work “developing models that help central bankers and finance ministers to stabilize their countries, avoiding long recessions and runaway inflation,” writes reporter Graeme Wearden for The Guardian. “The laureates’ work has provided us with a stable theoretical foundation for the models that are now used by central banks and governments around the world,” says John Hassler, chair of the Nobel Committee. “With them, we are better equipped to deal with shocks in the economy, such as energy crises or sudden changes in how much households consume.”
Boston Globe reporter Jon Chesto spotlights the fall fair event held as part of the MIT x GE Vernova Energy & Climate Alliance, during which, GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik shared his enthusiasm for hiring MIT graduates. “Something we talk a lot about inside Vernova is the world is changing very quickly but we need to change quicker and even faster than that so we can lead in the world,” says Strazik. “Over the last year-plus on this campus, we see a lot of opportunities for us to get better through bringing you into the organization.”
Prof. Justin Reich speaks to The Boston Globe’s John Hilliard about the implementation of AI in the Boston Public Schools. “There’s a risk of not engaging with AI and being left behind. But there’s also a risk that this is going to be harmful,” says Reich. “There’s no evidence which clearly says that one of these pathways is better than the other.”