Tim Cook: Technology Should Serve Humanity, Not the Other Way Around

Earlier this week, striding across the stage at Apple's annual developer conference in front of a crowd of thousands at the San Jose Convention Center, Tim Cook was animated and gushing, an evangelist for a series of new products and features. Among them: the HomePod smart speaker (see "Apple Is Countering Amazon and Google with a Siri-Enabled Speaker") and new ways developers can build artificial intelligence into apps. By Thursday morning, the Apple CEO was on the other coast, sitting on a gray couch next to a yellow emoji pillow (a happy face) at the MIT Media Lab's Affective Computing Group listening to Rosalind Picard talk about depression. Cook, who will give this year's MIT commencement address, is spending the day before learning more about research on campus, much of it involving sensors and AI. Picard, an expert in using wearable devices and phone data to measure human emotions, is researching how data pulled from cell phones might help identify and perhaps even predict depression, a problem expected to be the second leading cause of disability in the world by 2020.