To that end, the college now encompasses multiple existing labs and centers, including the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and multiple academic units, including the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. At the same time, the college has embarked on a plan to hire 50 new faculty members, half of whom will have shared appointments in other departments across all five schools to create a true Institute-wide entity. Those faculty members--two-thirds of whom have already been hired--will conduct research at the boundaries of advanced computing and AI. "We want to do two things: ensure that MIT stays at the forefront of computer science, AI research, and education and infuse the forefront of computing into disciplines across MIT." The new faculty members have already begun helping the college respond to an undeniable reality facing many students: They've been overwhelmingly drawn to advanced computing tools, yet computer science classes are often too technical for nonmajors who want to apply those tools in other disciplines.

Kissinger, former Secretary of State in the Nixon & Ford administrations; Schmidt, former CEO of Google; Huttenlocher, an acclaimed computer vision research who is currently a dean at MIT's Schwarzman College of Computing. Why it's good: The book's trio of authors brings their expertise in statecraft, business, and academia to explore how AI is set to reshape society. "AI's promise of epoch-making transformations--in society, economics, politics, and foreign policy--portends effects beyond the scope of any single author's or field's traditional focuses," the authors contend in an online preview of the book. In the time since The Age of A.I. was published, a revolution in generative AI has brought us much closer to the promise of artificial general intelligence -- the representation of human cognitive abilities in software-- making the book's discussion of how society will change as machines increasingly perform human tasks all the more relevant.

I came of age in the 1980s, programming personal computers such as the Commodore VIC-20 and Apple ][e at home. Going on to study computer science (CS) in college and ultimately getting a Ph.D. at Berkeley, the bulk of my professional training was rooted in what I will call "classical" CS: programming, algorithms, data structures, systems, programming languages. In Classical Computer Science, the ultimate goal is to reduce an idea to a program written by a human--source code in a language like Java or C or Python. Every idea in Classical CS--no matter how complex or sophisticated, from a database join algorithm to the mind-bogglingly obtuse Paxos consensus protocol--can be expressed as a human-readable, human-comprehendible program. When I was in college in the early 1990s, we were still in the depths of the AI Winter, and AI as a field was likewise dominated by classical algorithms.

As a graduate student doing his master's thesis on speech recognition at the MIT AI Lab (now the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory), Dan Huttenlocher worked closely with Professor Victor Zue. Well known for pioneering the development of systems that enable an user to interact with computers using spoken language, Zue traveled frequently to Asia -- where much of the early research in speech recognition happened during the 1980s. Huttenlocher occasionally accompanied his professor on these trips, many of which involved interactions with members of MIT Industrial Liaison Program, as he recalls. "It was a tremendous opportunity," according to Huttenlocher, "and it was a large part of what built my interest in engaging with companies and industry in addition to the academic side of research." Huttenlocher went on to earn his PhD in computer vision at the Institute and has since embarked on a career that encompasses academia, industry, and the philanthropic sector.

For the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing Dean Dan Huttenlocher, bringing disciplines together is the best way to address challenges and opportunities posed by rapid advancements in computing. What does it mean to be human in an age where artificial intelligence agents make decisions that shape human actions? That's a deep question with no easy answers, and it's been on the mind of Dan Huttenlocher SM '84, PhD '88, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, for the past few years. "Advances in AI are going to happen, but the destination that we get to with those advances is up to us, and it is far from certain," says Huttenlocher, who is also the Henry Ellis Warren Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Along with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and elder statesman Henry Kissinger, Huttenlocher recently explored some of the quandaries posed by the rise of AI, in the book, "The Age of AI: And Our Human Future."

What does it mean to be human in an age where artificial intelligence agents make decisions that shape human actions? That's a deep question with no easy answers, and it's been on the mind of Dan Huttenlocher SM '84, PhD '88, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, for the past few years. "Advances in AI are going to happen, but the destination that we get to with those advances is up to us, and it is far from certain," says Huttenlocher, who is also the Henry Ellis Warren Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Along with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and elder statesman Henry Kissinger, Huttenlocher recently explored some of the quandaries posed by the rise of AI, in the book, "The Age of AI: And Our Human Future." For Huttenlocher and his co-authors, "Our belief is that, to get there, we need much more informed dialogue and much more multilateral dialogue. Our hope is that the book will get people interested in doing that from a broad range of places," he says.

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This article appears in the November/December 2021 issue of The American Prospect magazine. The term "artificial intelligence" is widely recognized by researchers as less a technically precise descriptor than an aspirational project that comprises a growing collection of data-centric technologies. The recent AI trend kicked off around 2010, when a combination of increased computing power and massive troves of web data reanimated interest in decades-old techniques. It wasn't the algorithms that were new as much as the concentrated resources and the surveillance business models capable of collecting, storing, and processing previously unfathomable amounts of data. In other words, so-called "advances" in AI celebrated over the last decade are primarily the product of significantly concentrated data and computing resources that reside in the hands of a few large tech corporations like Amazon, Facebook, and Google.

This article appears in the November/December 2021 issue of The American Prospect magazine. The term "artificial intelligence" is widely recognized by researchers as less a technically precise descriptor than an aspirational project that comprises a growing collection of data-centric technologies. The recent AI trend kicked off around 2010, when a combination of increased computing power and massive troves of web data reanimated interest in decades-old techniques. It wasn't the algorithms that were new as much as the concentrated resources and the surveillance business models capable of collecting, storing, and processing previously unfathomable amounts of data. In other words, so-called "advances" in AI celebrated over the last decade are primarily the product of significantly concentrated data and computing resources that reside in the hands of a few large tech corporations like Amazon, Facebook, and Google.

At the age of 98, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has a whole new area of interest: artificial intelligence. He became intrigued after being persuaded by Eric Schmidt, who was then the executive chairman of Google, to attend a lecture on the topic while at the Bilderberg conference in 2016. The two have teamed up with the dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, Daniel Huttenlocher, to write a bracing new book, The Age of AI, about the implications of the rapid rise and deployment of artificial intelligence, which they say "augurs a revolution in human affairs." The book argues that artificial intelligence processes have become so powerful, so seamlessly enmeshed in human affairs, and so unpredictable, that without some forethought and management, the kind of "epoch-making transformations" they will deliver may send human history in a dangerous direction. Kissinger and Schmidt sat down with TIME to talk about the future they envision. Kissinger: When I was an undergraduate, I wrote my undergraduate thesis of 300 pages--which was banned after that ever to be permitted--called "The Meaning of History."