School of Humanities Arts and Social Sciences

Mike Beigel ‘70, who invented Mu-Tron III, considered to be “the first commercial envelope filter pedal [that] allowed guitar players to achieve a synthesizer-like sound” used in popular 1970s music, has died at 79, reports Alex Williams for The New York Times. “The Mu-Tron III was the most renowned of several effects pedals that Mr. Beigel invented for Musitronics, a New Jersey-based company that he co-founded in 1972,” writes Williams. Musitronics, “produced a variety of sought-after pedals, including the Mu-Tron Octave Divider, Phasor, Flanger and Bi-Phase, which have been adopted by notables like Neil Young, Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins and John Frusciante, the Chili Peppers guitarist.” 

CodeSignal, co-founded by alumnus and CEO Tigran Sloyan, has developed Agentic Skills Intelligence, a new product that “uses AI agents to evaluate the skills people use in their work and links the findings to personalized practice,” writes Forbes’ Ray Ravaglia. CodeSignal has built an AI agent “for each domain in its job taxonomy, such as engineering and sales, along with agents for capabilities that cut across jobs, among them communication and AI literacy,” notes Ravaglia. “The agents draw on systems including Gong, Salesforce, and GitHub, and they score what they find against rubrics the company says are grounded in industrial-organizational psychology.” 

In a conversation with Slate’s Shirin Ali, Charles Stewart III director of MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab, discusses a framework to help voters “see important red flags in the hours immediately following Election Day,” detailed in his new paper “The Day After: Threats and Guardrails in the 2026 Election.” “After Election Day, that’s where we’re thinking about getting the final count in,” says Stewart. “We shift into the formal process of canvassing the vote, certifying it, and making sure that we’ve named the winners.”  

An analysis by Prof. Charles Stewart III, director of MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab, found that requests for mail-in ballots were down in Georgia, Maine, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin earlier this month, reports Patrick Marley, Leslie Shapiro and Laura Meckler for The Washington Post. “Those five states can be more fully analyzed than others because they provide data showing how voting patterns compare with the same stage of the election cycle in 2022,” note Marley, Shapiro and Meckler. “In data collected four weeks before Election Day, requests were down most sharply in Georgia — by 50 percent compared with the same point in 2022.” 

Live on GBH’s “The Curiosity Desk,” hosted by Edgar B. Herwick III, Prof. Adam Berinsky joins Boston Globe reporter Aaron Pressman and Kate Gage from the Cooperative Lab Project for a conversation about the impact of AI on the 2026 midterm elections. Berinsky notes that in the runup to the midterms, voters “need to be careful about what they are paying attention to. I think we want to separate out what is new to AI and what is just communication in general,” says Berinsky. “In elections where margins are tens of thousands of votes in states that can determine the presidency, even really small effects matter.”  

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.”