The MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) was founded in 1950 in response to “a new era emerging from social upheaval and the disasters of war,” as outlined in the 1949 Lewis Committee Report. The report’s findings emphasized MIT’s role and responsibility in the new nuclear age, which called for doubling down on […]
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What makes work valuable? Michal Masny, the NC Ethics of Technology Postdoctoral Fellow in the MIT Department of Philosophy, investigates the role work plays in our lives and its impact on our well-being. Masny sees numerous benefits to work, beyond a paycheck. It’s a space for people to develop excellence at something, make a social contribution, […]
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MIT.nano has announced that 16 startups became active participants in its START.nano program in 2025, more than doubling the number of new companies from the previous year. Aimed at speeding the transition of hard-tech innovation to market, START.nano supports new ventures through the discounted use of MIT.nano shared facilities and a guided access to the […]
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Artificial intelligence holds promise for helping doctors diagnose patients and personalize treatment options. However, an international group of scientists led by MIT cautions that AI systems, as currently designed, carry the risk of steering doctors in the wrong direction because they may overconfidently make incorrect decisions. One way to prevent these mistakes is to program […]
Read MoreWho benefits from artificial intelligence? This basic question, which has been especially salient during the AI surge of the last few years, was front and center at a conference at MIT on Wednesday, as speakers and audience members grappled with the many dimensions of AI’s impact. In one of the conferences’s keynote talks, journalist Karen […]
Read MoreThe following is a joint announcement from the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, Hasso Plattner Institute, and Hasso Plattner Foundation. The MIT Morningside Academy for Design (MAD), MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI), and Hasso Plattner Foundation celebrated the launch of the MIT and HPI AI […]
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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 […]
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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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Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt presented a forceful analysis of the damage smartphones and social media are doing to our cognition, our civic fabric, and our children’s wellbeing, while calling for renewed action to ward off their effects, in the latest of MIT’s Compton Lectures on Wednesday. “Around the world, people are getting diminished,” Haidt said. “Less […]
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A new artificial intelligence control system enables soft robotic arms to learn a wide repertoire of motions and tasks once, then adjust to new scenarios on the fly, without needing retraining or sacrificing functionality. This breakthrough brings soft robotics closer to human-like adaptability for real-world applications, such as in assistive robotics, rehabilitation robots, and wearable […]
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Before the thrill of victory; before the agony of defeat; before the gold medalist’s national anthem plays, there is the Olympic torch. A symbol of unity, friendship, and the spirit of competition, the torch links today’s Olympic Games to its heritage in ancient Greece. The torch for the 2026 Milano Cortina Olympic Games and Paralympic […]
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