Ideas Made to Matter
Artificial Intelligence
AI Expert Spotlight: Tom Malone
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We asked several MIT experts about their latest projects and what they see as the most exciting—and concerning—aspects of the AI boom.
Tom Malone, Professor of Information Technology, Director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence
and his team focus on how people and AI together can do things that could never be done before. They’ve developed a tool to help people in the early stages of designing visual objects, like illustrations or cars. It quickly creates a wide range of images to illustrate a theme, reducing the risk of what’s called design fixation. “We’re looking for innovative ways to combine people and computers by taking advantage of what each does best,” Malone says.
What is the biggest opportunity in working with AI?
I think that today's generation AI systems can usefully be viewed as a new "species" of intelligence on our planet. This new species is better than humans at some things and worse at others. Our challenge is to learn how to live and work constructively with it. To do that, I’m most excited about our current work on developing a scientific framework for generating and evaluating new ideas about how people and AI can work together. You could call it a “science for the future of work.”
What do you see as the biggest area for caution?
Most powerful technologies can be used intentionally for harm as well as for good (like knives and nuclear power). And many can also have unintentional negative consequences (like cars, drugs, and unsafe bridges). In this sense, AI is no different from many previous technologies. Personally, I’m less worried about the risks of using AI to perpetuate past harms (like biased hiring decisions) and more worried about the risks of new and much bigger harms from things like robots that kill people or very large-scale deceptions such as simulated videos of real people.
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