Research engineer Bryan Reimer speaks with Ashley Halsey of The Washington Post about the need for a national conversation to determine how safe driverless cars should be before they become more widely available. “Unless we have defined how safe is safe enough — and we are in agreement — the nature of politics is that fingers will point at each other,” says Reimer.
Dr. Joseph Coughlin, director of the AgeLab, speaks with Today Show reporter A. Pawlowski about his new book and why females are uniquely positioned to handle life after middle age. “One of the greatest under-appreciated sources of innovation and new business may in fact be women over 50,” says Coughlin.
Research affiliate Sam Ford has enlisted colleagues at MIT and USC, including Prof. Daniela Rus, to participate in his Future of Work Initiative, writes Jeff Howe in The Boston Globe. The group is trying to better understand how technology is impacting the job market in Kentucky and determine how to provide more useful solutions to those affected.
Writing for The Boston Globe, President L. Rafael Reif issues a call for allies to help address the changing nature of work in the age of automation. “Automation will transform our work, our lives, our society," writes Reif. "Whether the outcome is inclusive or exclusive, fair or laissez-faire, is up to us.”
Joe Coughlin, director of the AgeLab, writes about the need to rethink how people live as they age. “An older America done right will improve quality of life across the board. After all, if we’re lucky, the future of old age is the future for everyone,” said Coughlin in Time magazine.
According to Prof. Robert Merton, wealth advisors are unlikely to be replaced by robots, writes Stacey Yuen for CNBC. Merton explains that the problem with replacing wealth managers with robo-advisors is a lack of trust. “What you need to make technology work is to create trust. Technology doesn't create trust on its own,” he notes.
Graduate student Anish Athalye speaks with the BBC about his work examining how image recognitions systems can be fooled. "More and more real-world systems are starting to incorporate neural networks, and it's a big concern that these systems may be possible to subvert or attack using adversarial examples,” Athalye explains.
New Scientist reporter Abigail Beale writes that MIT researchers have been able to trick an AI system into thinking an image of a turtle is a rifle. Beale writes that the results, “raise concerns about the accuracy of face recognition systems and the safety of driverless cars, for example.”
A paper from MIT researchers suggests that small towns will be more negatively impacted by automation than larger cities, writes Ari Gaskell for HuffPost. The researchers found that, “automation is more likely in roles with repetitive tasks playing a major part, and such lower skilled roles tend to be concentrated more in smaller towns than larger cities.”
Newsweek reporter Joseph Frankel writes that MIT Media Lab researchers have developed an AI system named Shelley that uses human input to write short horror stories. Frankel explains that Shelley, “tweets out one or two sentences as the start of a new horror story, then calls for users to respond with their own lines.”
In an article for HuffPost, Erandi Palihakkara highlights MIT’s Inclusive Innovation Challenge, which aims to recognize “organizations (both for profit and non-profit) that are committed to inclusion of technological innovations for economic prosperity of base and middle income earners.”
Inside Higher Ed reporter Lindsay McKenzie spotlights how MIT has begun a new pilot program that offers students the option to receive tamper-free digital diplomas, in addition to a traditional one. McKenzie explains that, “students can quickly access a digital diploma that can be shared on social media and verified by employers to ensure its authenticity.”
Deborah Blum, director of the Knight Science Journalism Program, writes for The Boston Globe about a new book that spotlights the work of women code breakers during World War II. Blum writes that a number of recent books, “remind us that women have been vitally important to the success of both science and technology — if only we will give them that credit.”
Writing for Photo District News, Conor Risch spotlights the work of science photographer and research scientist Felice Frankel, who works with scientists to capture photographs that translate their research to the general public. “Frankel has made improving the visual literacy of the science community a major part of her work,” Risch explains.
Principal Research Scientist Andrew McAfee addresses problems with job growth in the U.S. and the belief that robots will take jobs from humans on WBUR’s Radio Boston. “The problem that we’re facing in this country is not that we stopped creating jobs,” McAfee says. “We’re creating more lower-middle class jobs that are less well paid, more precarious.”