Technology and society

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Sustaining diplomacy amid competition in US-China relations

The United States and China “are the two largest emitters of carbon in the world,” said Nicholas Burns, former U.S. ambassador to the People’s Republic of China, at a recent MIT seminar. “We need to work with each other for the good of both of our countries.” During the MITEI Presents: Advancing the Energy Transition presentation, […]

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New MIT class uses anthropology to improve chatbots

Young adults growing up in the attention economy — preparing for adult life, with social media and chatbots competing for their attention — can easily fall into unhealthy relationships with digital platforms. But what if chatbots weren’t mere distractions from real life? Could they be designed humanely, as moral partners whose digital goal is to

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The philosophical puzzle of rational artificial intelligence

To what extent can an artificial system be rational?A new MIT course, 6.S044/24.S00 (AI and Rationality), doesn’t seek to answer this question. Instead, it challenges students to explore this and other philosophical problems through the lens of AI research. For the next generation of scholars, concepts of rationality and agency could prove integral in AI

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Why it’s critical to move beyond overly aggregated machine-learning metrics

MIT researchers have identified significant examples of machine-learning model failure when those models are applied to data other than what they were trained on, raising questions about the need to test whenever a model is deployed in a new setting.“We demonstrate that even when you train models on large amounts of data, and choose the

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Decoding the Arctic to predict winter weather

Every autumn, as the Northern Hemisphere moves toward winter, Judah Cohen starts to piece together a complex atmospheric puzzle. Cohen, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), has spent decades studying how conditions in the Arctic set the course for winter weather throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. His research

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Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work Launches at MIT

The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work officially launched on Nov. 3, 2025, bringing together scholars, policymakers, and practitioners to explore critical questions about economic opportunity, technology, and democracy.Co-directed by MIT professors Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, and Simon Johnson, the new Stone Center analyzes the forces that contribute to growing income

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MIT scientists investigate memorization risk in the age of clinical AI

What is patient privacy for? The Hippocratic Oath, thought to be one of the earliest and most widely known medical ethics texts in the world, reads: “Whatever I see or hear in the lives of my patients, whether in connection with my professional practice or not, which ought not to be spoken of outside, I

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Researchers discover a shortcoming that makes LLMs less reliable

Large language models (LLMs) sometimes learn the wrong lessons, according to an MIT study.Rather than answering a query based on domain knowledge, an LLM could respond by leveraging grammatical patterns it learned during training. This can cause a model to fail unexpectedly when deployed on new tasks.The researchers found that models can mistakenly link certain

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Exploring how AI will shape the future of work

“MIT hasn’t just prepared me for the future of work — it’s pushed me to study it. As AI systems become more capable, more of our online activity will be carried out by artificial agents. That raises big questions: How should we design these systems to understand our preferences? What happens when AI begins making

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Helping K-12 schools navigate the complex world of AI

With the rapid advancement of generative artificial intelligence, teachers and school leaders are looking for answers to complicated questions about successfully integrating technology into lessons, while also ensuring students actually learn what they’re trying to teach. Justin Reich, an associate professor in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing program, hopes a new guidebook published by the MIT Teaching Systems Lab

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