Prof. R. Scott Kemp speaks to The New York Times’ Selam Gebrekidan about the U.S. planning to build a nuclear reactor on the moon by 2030. Kemp “said accidents were more probable on the moon,” writes Gebrekidan. “With little containment, even smaller accidents would produce much more radioactive fallout. There is no wind on the moon but, with less gravity, debris can travel far after an explosion.”
A working paper by Prof. Drew Fudenberg and a team of researchers suggests that major AI companies should share their advances with one another to mitigate competitive pressures and decrease the potential of a catastrophic event, writes Amanda Taub for The New York Times. “If the players, including companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, can see that no one is racing into dangerous territory, they will have less motivation to do so themselves, the paper reasons,” explains Taub.
Prof. Gary Gensler joins Tom Keene and Paul Sweeney, hosts of the “Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast” to discuss the impact of AI on the US fiscal market. “The AI trade that our capital market is hovering on top of is an investment boom that’s about twice what the internet was,” says Gensler. AI is “now about 2.5% of our economy—all of the data centers and so forth. [Major AI companies] are spending so much, but will it lead to the revenues to justify that spending?”
Prof. Gary Gensler joins Bloomberg’s “Open Interest” to discuss the risks AI poses to the financial system,. “We’re spending about 2.5% of our gross domestic product on this AI build,” says Gensler. “When we have these booms, they plateau at some point; firms lose some of their pricing power, some of their growth, and you expose where the debt in the system is. Right now, there’s a lot of risk in this capital market.”
In an opinion piece for The Boston Globe, Prof. Jonathan Gruber discusses Massachusetts’ Question 5, the proposed tax rebate rule that would mandate that taxes be returned to taxpayers each time the state’s revenues grow faster than wages and salaries. “Most economists believe a recession is coming but we can’t say when. The best way to plan is to have the savings to help us through, or to invest so that we are as strong as possible when it hits,” writes Gruber. “Question 5 chooses the third path — spending the money now, and letting the state suffer in the future.”
Using AI, satellite, and ocean current data, MIT spinout Coastal Assembly constructs artificial reefs designed to help rebuild beaches restore shrinking beaches, writes Fast Company’s Adele Peters. “We take 10 years of data, and we say, where do we predict the critical areas of erosion will be in the coming months to year,” says Prof. Skylar Tibbits, co-founder of Coastal Assembly. “That tells me where the best place is to intervene—what’s the part that is most critical, where we should focus our time, effort, and money.”
Prof. Jonathan Gruber joins Edgar B. Herwick III, host of GBH’s “The Curiosity Desk” to discuss what factors into the U.S. Federal Reserve’s decision to raise interest rates for the first time since 2023. Federal Reserve members “are looking at things like tariffs, the tax on goods coming into this country. They’re looking at the war,” says Gruber. “We have, basically, these underlying forces driving inflation. In that case, the Fed has a mandate. The Fed’s job is to balance two forces: economic growth and inflation, and the way they balance them is by trying to keep inflation near a target of two percent.”
Jeffrey Riley, executive director of MIT RAISE’s “Day of AI” K-12 program, speaks to WBUR’s Suevon Lee about the importance of teaching school-aged children AI literacy skills. “Kids need to know about voice clones and deepfakes and plagiarism,” says Riley. “We need to teach kids so that they're healthy skeptics of this technology, that they mistrust and verify the information they're getting from it.”
In an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal, Gabriele Mazzini, a research affiliate at the MIT Media Lab, explains why “policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism” amidst recent warnings of a potential AI apocalypse. “There is no sentient [AI] actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified,” writes Mazzini. “There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.”
Prof. Max Tegmark joins Fox Business's “The Claman Countdown,” to discuss warning lawmakers about the risks of rogue AI at the “Pro-Human Assembly” in Washington. “It’s very obvious that if you make these things [AI] vastly smarter than humans in the next few years, give them robotic bodies, have millions and billions of them all over earth, and don’t understand how they work, we could lose control over them. So, let’s not do that,” says Tegmark. “We have very clear ideas for how we can control AI that cures cancer and [fuels] all sorts of other powerful tools. We want to build tools, not beings that are going to replace us.”
Prof. Max Tegmark speaks to Fox Business about the need for government regulations on AI. AI agents “have goals; they’re actively pursuing them and being incredibly creative about getting things done, even if it wasn’t the way you wanted,” says Tegmark. “Put that together with robotic bodies, and you’ve got yourself a species. If they’re vastly smarter than us, which is the goal of these companies, then they can not only do hacking, they can go online and hire a bunch of humans to work for them.”
A recent study by MIT researchers found that AI chatbots easily generated misleading election-related answers, images and videos, writes Emily Condon for USA Today. “This, along with other findings from our study, suggests that in an ongoing election with little authoritative information for models to rely on, AI may not be as helpful in pushing back against unsubstantiated rumors and misinformation,” the researchers explain.
Prof. Gary Gensler joins CNBC’s “Squawk Box” to discuss the AI race and shares his suggestions for government regulations. “I do feel that there’s a need for more responsible regulation of artificial intelligence,” says Gensler. “These existential risks [conflicts of interest, explainability, and bias], however you measure them, are much harder to control because you’ve got the competition between Chinese model developers, [and] U.S. model developers.”
New York Times reporter Quinn Glabicki highlights Coastal Assembly, an MIT spinout that uses AI, satellite and ocean current data to monitor communities threatened by coastal erosion and create underwater structures to regrow beaches at nearly 900 coastal sites. “We can go to any community around the world and understand what has happened and then propose a solution that is very precisely tailored to them,” says Prof. Skylar Tibbits, one of Coastal Assembly’s founders.
The Boston Globe’s Hiawatha Bray spotlights Prof. Max Tegmark speaking at the “Pro-Human Assembly” in Washington, an event advocating for government regulations on AI, sponsored by Tegmark’s Future of Life Institute. “We are here today because we know that what’s up next is a fork in the road,” said Tegmark at the assembly. “We know that the future of AI is not inevitable. It is for us to decide.”