Cambridge, MA – MIT Media Lab – EmTech Future. Can an artificial intelligence chatbot give sound financial planning advice? It sounds like a straightforward question, but as consumer use of conversational models explodes, the economic reality is unfolding at blinding speed.
During the session titled The Price of Tomorrow, Taha Choukhmane Associate Professor of Finance
Cambridge, MA – MIT Media Lab – EmTech Future. For all the cultural excitement surrounding generative text and conversational chatbots, modern language models remain fundamentally tethered to human prose. They predict the next token based on things humans have already written down. But nature does not write memos. The atmospheric circulation driving supercells, the delicate
For years, whether recording episodes in the studio, drafting analyses on emerging tech, or speaking to audiences across the globe, I have chased the inflection points where innovation collides with human reality. Yet sitting here, microphone around my head, looking at my PowerPoint seeing the names of executives, engineers, and everyday thinkers, the air felt
Cambridge, MA – MIT Media Lab – EmTech Future. This talk was mind altering. For four decades, the MIT Media Lab has served as an intellectual sanctuary for wild ideas, unconventional prototypes, and iconoclastic thinkers who refuse to fit into neat academic categories. In the session titled The Human Frontier, introduced by Media Lab Director
Cambridge, MA – MIT Media Lab – EmTech Future. Few cultural critics can diagnose digital rot with the ferocious precision, moral clarity, and linguistic flair of Cory Doctorow. Taking the stage for the session titled Rethinking Our Relationship with AI, Doctorow, an activist, author, and special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was interviewed by
Cambridge, MA – MIT Media Lab – EmTech Future. Picture a modern commercial airliner cruising at 38,000 feet through pitch-black skies over the Mediterranean. The ride is smooth, the cockpit instruments are calm, and suddenly an automated, mechanical voice pierces the darkness: “Terrain, Terrain. Pull Up”. The flight crew faces a terrifying split-second dilemma: are
Cambridge, MA – MIT Media Lab – EmTech Future. Quantum computing has long suffered from an exhausting public relations cycle: on one side lies the distant theoretical promise of world-altering supremacy; on the other, the sobering reality of noisy, fragile hardware confined to academic cleanrooms. During the session titled Quantum Convergence, Jerry Chow, IBM Fellow
Cambridge, MA – MIT Media Lab – EmTech Future. More than two centuries ago, the French polymath Pierre-Simon Laplace conceptualized a powerful scientific thought experiment that would become known to history as Laplace’s Demon. If an intellect could know the exact positions and forces acting on every particle in the universe, nothing would be uncertain;
For thirty years, the web was built for eyeballs: human fingers tapping credit card numbers into static forms, clicking ‘I am not a robot,’ and waiting for a bank to approve thirty bucks. But that web just slipped into the minority. Today, over 57% of all internet traffic isn’t human—it’s autonomous AI agents scraping, computing,
Cambridge, MA – MIT Media Lab – EmTech Future. As the world wrestles with record-shattering global temperatures, a sobering technological contradiction has taken center stage: the rapid expansion of modern artificial intelligence is running on an immense supply of fossil fuel power. In her compelling keynote address, Evelyn Wang, Vice President for Energy and Climate
Cambridge, MA – MIT Media Lab – EmTech Future. A profound structural shift is underway inside advanced research laboratories, and it has almost nothing to do with generating conversational marketing copy. In the session titled Designing the Future, Bob Metcalfe, legendary Ethernet co-inventor and chair of the MIT Corporation, sat down with prominent venture investor
Cambridge, MA – MIT Media Lab – EmTech Future. In modern corporate cybersecurity, an uncomfortable truth has emerged: the bad guys adopted generative artificial intelligence faster, more aggressively, and with far fewer ethical inhibitions than corporate boardrooms. During the session titled AI x Cybersecurity, Tom Kellermann, Vice President of AI Security and Threat Research at
Cambridge, MA – MIT Media Lab – EmTech Future. Nature has spent roughly 3.8 billion years conducting the most sprawling, creative research and development campaign in history. Evolution engineered millions of functional molecular machines, intricate cellular networks, and robust organisms long before humans ever conceptualized a microscope. Yet, Flagship Labs, President Avak Kahvejian took the
For centuries, high-value ownership has been trapped behind a wall of clunky legal paperwork, illiquid secondary markets, and gatekept syndications. If you owned a piece of the Empire State Building, you were married to that asset for seven to ten years—whether you liked it or not.
That reality is dissolving. Ernst & Young projects that
If you’ve been hanging out with me since 2017, you know I’ve been tracking the collision of AI and the arts back when ‘AI video’ looked like a surrealist fever dream and ‘AI voice’ sounded like a polite but highly medicated robot. We watched static digital art evolve into generative universes, but today, we are
Across virtually every industry today, billions of dollars are flowing into artificial intelligence. Boardrooms are celebrating instant productivity gains, automated workflows, and algorithmic efficiency. But underneath the hype, a quiet crisis is taking hold.
We are adopting AI tools originally built to augment human judgment, only to watch organizations use them to replace it. Systems