His lab uses mice for some protocols, but animal studies are notoriously bad at identifying human treatments. Around 95% of the drugs developed through animal research fail in people. Researchers have documented this translation gap since at least 1962. "All these pharmaceutical companies know the animal models stink," says Don Ingber, founder of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard and a leading advocate for organs on chips. "The FDA knows they stink."

In late 2018, thousands of workers walked out of Google offices around the globe to protest the company's handling of sexual harassment accusations against prominent executives. The same year, hundreds of Salesforce employees signed a letter to CEO Marc Benioff protesting the fact the company sold products to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Also in the headlines was an effort by some Microsoft employees to protest the company's bid for work on the U.S. Department of Defense's Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) project. In a letter to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, the employees wrote, "many Microsoft employees don't believe that what we build should be used for waging war." Tech employee activism is nothing new, but the momentum generated by the 2018 wave of protests was.

Long the prediction of futurists and philosophers, the lived reality of technology replacing human work has been a constant feature since the cotton gin, the assembly line and, more recently, the computer. What is very much up for debate in the imaginations of economists and Hollywood producers is whether the future will look like "The Terminator," with self-aware Schwarzenegger bots on the hunt, or "The Jetsons," with obedient robo-maids leaving us humans very little work and plenty of time for leisure and family. The most chilling future in film may be that in Disney's "Wall-E," where people are all too fat to stand, too busy staring at screens to talk to each other and too distracted to realize that the machines have taken over. We're deep into what-ifs with those representations, but the conversation about robots and work is increasingly paired with the debate over how to address growing income inequality -- a key issue in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. How should Americans deal with it?

"There's no simple answer," said Stuart Russell, a computer scientist at UC Berkeley, an adjunct professor of neurological surgery at UC San Francisco and the author of a forthcoming book, "Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control." "But in the long run nearly all current jobs will go away, so we need fairly radical policy changes to prepare for a very different future economy. In his book, Russell writes, "One rapidly emerging picture is that of an economy where far fewer people work because work is unnecessary." That's either a very frightening or a tantalizing prospect, depending very much on whether and how much you (and/or society) think people ought to have to work and how society is going to put a price on human labor. There will be less work in manufacturing, less work in call centers, less work driving trucks, and more work in health care and home care and construction. MIT Technology Review tried to track all the different reports on the effect ...

Robots have arrived at Bill and Carol Shuler's farm near Baroda, Mich., and life has taken a turn for the better. "It absolutely changes your lifestyle. It gives you a life!" says Bill Shuler. For decades -- for the entire time that Bill and Carol have been married, in fact -- the Shuler family's routine was practically set in stone: Get up at 3:45 a.m., clean the barn, feed the cows and milk them. Then get breakfast and take care of other work around the farm.

A 12-year-old who read The Lord Of The Rings aged five has become the youngest Cornell University freshman in the Ivy School's history. Jeremy Shuler was home-schooled by his parents - both aerospace engineers from Grand Prairie, Texas - and started reading books in English and Korean aged two. To help get him into Cornell, Jeremy's parents moved to Ithaca, where his father, Andy Shuler, took up a post at Lockheed Martin Upstate New York. A 12-year-old who started studying calculus aged 6 has become the youngest Cornell University freshman in the Ivy School's history With his bowl-cut hair, cherubic face and frequent happy laughter, Jeremy is clearly still a child despite his advanced intelligence. He swung in his chair while his parents, who he calls Mommy and Daddy, recounted his early years during an interview at the engineering school where his grandfather is a professor, his father got his doctorate and Jeremy is now an undergrad.