SHASS News

Who 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 […]

Growing up in the village of Kewa — located between Santa Fe and Albuquerque in New Mexico — William Pacheco, a member of the Santo Domingo Pueblo, learned the value of his language, its history, and the traditions it carries. “We speak Keres, a language isolate found in seven villages and communities in central New Mexico,” […]

MIT senior Srihitha Dasari never imagined she would be speaking in front of the United Nations about health care, technology, and the power of co-designing public health interventions in collaboration with impacted communities.  But when she stepped up to the podium to speak about digital well-being and community-centered health care design, she carried with her […]

Zora Neale Hurston remains one of America’s best-known authors. Charles Henry Turner developed landmark studies about the behavior of bees and spiders. Brian Wilson founded the Beach Boys. George Nissen invented the trampoline. What do they all have in common? Well, for one thing, they were all innovative Americans — creators and discoverers, producing work […]

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 […]