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Prof. Taha Choukhmane co-authored a new study examining how Americans are using AI in their financial planning and found that “AI consistently gave better advice to people who asked better questions,” reports Daniel de Visé for USA Today. “It might be that AI is going to be a little more useful for people who already know a little bit about finance and financial literacy,” Choukhmane explains.

A study by MIT scientists uncovered the culprit in the deep-sea mystery of what was reducing the ocean’s carbon-trapping capacity: dense microbe ‘cities’ living inside marine snow (slowly sinking particles of fish poop and other debris), reports Scientific American reporter Damien Pine. “Ultimately everything that’s happening at these microscales—that’s really what’s terraforming our planet,” explains Prof. Andrew Babbin.

New York Times reporters Gina Kolata and Rebecca Robbins highlight how university researchers at MIT and Harvard laid the groundwork for the development of a new treatment for pancreatic cancer that “could wind up being the most significant advance in cancer treatment in 15 years, since the arrival of immunotherapy.” They write: “In 1982, Robert Weinberg, a scientist at MIT, made one of the seminal discoveries about how RAS genes fuel some cancers.” 

Writing for MassLive, Scott Kirsner highlights Gander Robotics, a startup co-founded by Sloan graduate student Michael Autery, that is “developing a torpedo-like device that is light enough to be tossed over the side of a ship — and designed to find a person in the water.” Autery, who served 15 years in the U.S. Navy, first pitched the idea for an “autonomous rescue swimmer” as part of an MIT entrepreneurship competition and notes: “if I had the same idea in a different place at the same time, I’m not sure it would’ve played out the same way. Cambridge is this very rich ecosystem for entrepreneurship.”

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. Sinan Aral speaks with Fast Company reporter Natalie Nixon about the risks of offloading creative work to AI systems. In one study, Aral and his colleagues found that with more creative work outsourced to AI, there was a resulting “slow homogenization of output that occurs when AI, trained on the same publicly available internet, starts flattening the edges that make creative work distinctive.” In another study, Aral’s team found, “cognitive offloading to AI (the act of outsourcing tasks you could do yourself) erodes the very skills you’re handing off.” 

In an article republished by Scientific American, Manon Bischoff delves into the history of Margaret Hamilton’s work at the MIT Instrumentation Lab, where she “was one of the people responsible for the features that ultimately made the moon landing possible.” Hamilton helped “program ‘emergency fixes,’ contingency procedures that were implemented when something unexpected happened during a mission.”

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.” 

Prof. Asu Ozdaglar, head of EECS and deputy dean of academics for the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, speaks with Kai Ryssdal of Marketplace about how MIT is preparing its students for the era of AI by teaching foundational skills that will enable them to find jobs in a variety of different sectors. The new Artificial Intelligence + Decision Making major (AI+D) teaches students about the “foundations of how to use this intelligence for enhancing human experience, human work, human education, all of those domains, so that no matter how the technology changes, these students can adapt their skills to the new set of tools and developments.”

Profs. Elisabeth Reynolds and Simon Johnson joined Tom Keene and Paul Sweeney on Bloomberg Surveillance to discuss their new book, "Priority Technologies: Ensuring U.S. Security and Shared Prosperity," which highlights six key areas where advances in technology can drive the U.S. economy and support national security. “Quantum is the next frontier and opens up billions of dollars of opportunity,” says Reynolds. “Not just for defense and encryption issues, but also across all sorts of applications in financial services and biopharma.” 

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.”