The work of the futureDavid Autor, David A. Mindell, and Elisabeth B. Reynolds
Editor’s Note: In 2020, an MIT Task Force produced a comprehensive report on the Work of the Future. Since then, the global pandemic has had a significant effect on work and businesses, providing the impetus for The Work of the Future, by the same authors. The book, from which the following excerpt is adapted, will be published by MIT Press on January 25, 2022. A decade ago, powerful mobile phones were still a novelty, driverless cars were never seen on public roadways, and computers did not listen to conversations or respond to spoken questions. The possibility of robots taking jobs seemed far […]
Better democracy through technologyAndrew Zaleski
When Mike Koval, the police chief of Madison, Wisconsin, abruptly resigned on a Sunday in September 2019, the community’s relationship with its men and women in blue was already strained. Use-of-force issues hung over the department after the killing of a Black teenager in 2015. Then, months before Koval left, another Black teenager, in the middle of a mental health crisis, was beaten on the head by an officer while being restrained by three others. The process of selecting a new police chief followed a standard formula. A five-person team of mayor-appointed, city-council-approved commissioners would make the ultimate decision, allowing […]
A campus exhibitionMIT News Staff
“Leslie Thornton: Begin Again, Again,” at the MIT List Center through February 13, is the artist’s first US solo museum exhibition. It includes a new installation of Peggy and Fred in Hell (1983–2015). “Leslie Thornton: Begin Again, Again,” at the MIT List Center through February 13, is the artist’s first US solo museum exhibition. It includes a new installation of Peggy and Fred in Hell (1983–2015).
Raj Tahil ’81 and Mary Jo WrennJ. Juniper Friedman
Raj Tahil credits MIT with sparking his entrepreneurial instincts. “I learned to see problems as interesting opportunities,” says the president of Torpac Capsules, which specializes in custom capsules and pharmaceutical equipment. In the spirit of creating opportunities, Tahil and his spouse, Mary Jo Wrenn, have created an MIT donor-advised fund (DAF)—an increasingly popular way to simplify charitable giving. The benefits of a DAF. An MIT DAF enables the donor to establish a charitable account maintained and managed by the MIT Investment Management Company, from which distributions may be made to MIT as well as to other charitable organizations. For Tahil and […]
Improving access to healthy, fast-casual foodCatherine Caruso, SM ’16
Cassandria Campbell, MCP ’11, traces her interest in food to her first summer job working with the Food Project on farms in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and Roxbury, the Boston neighborhood where she grew up. “I really enjoyed that experience of seeing things grow,” she recalls, “and I appreciated how much change it was creating in Roxbury by bringing people together and turning vacant lots into productive urban farms.” It wasn’t until she moved back to Roxbury after graduate school that she decided to dive into the food industry full time by founding Fresh Food Generation—a company striving to make healthy food […]
Energy from the earth, for the earthMark Wolverton
Geothermal power is a promising energy source limited by factors including the need to locate plants in areas where reservoirs of hot water deep below the earth’s surface are easily accessible. Carlos Araque is looking to change that through his company, Quaise, using a groundbreaking technology developed at MIT. “We need to go deeper and hotter to truly make geothermal a global source, so it’s no longer a matter of being close to a volcano or in Iceland or in the typical geothermal zones,” says Araque. But drilling so deep—two to 12 miles underground—is expensive and time-consuming. His company found […]
Schooling teachers in the realities of urban educationMichael Blanding
When Jesse Solomon ’91 first started teaching at a middle school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the 1990s, he was overwhelmed. “I had 25 students working at eight different grade levels—some that were learning English, some that were on individual education plans,” he says. “I wasn’t prepared for that level of complexity.” Luckily, a veteran teacher was in the next room. “Every day before school, I just went and copied what she had written on her board. She would talk me through what she was going to do that day, and how to think about the whole curriculum,” he remembers. “That’s […]
Ensuring a bright future for SeattleAri Daniel, PhD ’08
In 1982, when Lynn Best ’69 joined the public utility Seattle City Light, her team faced an immediate challenge: evaluating the environmental, cultural, and financial impacts of its three dams generating electricity on the Skagit River in northwest Washington State. As acting director, she was able to persuade City Light to allow the environmental team to lead negotiations. “Of course,” Best says, “the biggest issue was protecting the salmon on the river.” Four species of salmonids were known to spawn at different times and depths. The team relied upon science to determine optimal flow and ramping rates, placing the health […]
Zimbabwe’s climate migration is a sign of what’s to comeAndrew Mambondiyani
Julius Mutero has harvested virtually nothing in the past six years. For his entire adult life, he has farmed a three-hectare plot in Mabiya, a farming community in eastern Zimbabwe. There he grows maize and groundnuts to feed himself, his wife, and their three children. He sells whatever’s left for cash. But over a decade ago, his area started getting less rain and the rivers dried up. What was already a hot climate, with temperatures that could reach 30 °C (86 °F), began recording summer highs up to 37 °C (99 °F) on a regular basis. Now the rainy season […]
The internet runs on free open-source software. Who pays to fix it?Patrick Howell O’Neill
Right now, Volkan Yazici is working 22 hour days for free. Yazici is a member of the Log4J project, an open-source tool used widely to record activity inside various types of software. It helps run huge swaths of the internet, including applications ranging from iCloud to Twitter, and he and his colleagues are now desperately trying to deal with a massive vulnerability that has put billions of machines at risk. The vulnerability in Log4J is extremely easy to exploit. After sending a malicious string of characters to a vulnerable machine, hackers can execute any code they want. Some of the earliest attacks […]