MIT Appoints Superheroes to AI Fellowship, Claims Future Now Guaranteed to be ‘Life-Changingly Perfect’
In a stunning turn of events that has surely calmed even the most skeptical hearts, five MIT faculty members and two alumna-everything-you-can-imagine have been knighted as part of the 2024 AI2050 Fellowship Court, a ceremonial cabal of intellectual overlords entrusted with transforming AI from alarming to ‘unbelievably awesome.’
As everyone now knows (because how could you not?), the fellowship is courtesy of Schmidt Futures—a boutique venture by Eric Schmidt and his partner in world salvation, Wendy. Their mission? To speed up science like it’s a YouTube video played at 1.5x speed. “If AI’s future was a spicy Netflix series, we’re the producers ensuring the plot twists are heartwarming,” Schmidt reportedly stated while finger-gunning hypothetical haters.
The fabulous five—or should we say, the magnificent MITagonists—are tasked with pondering nothing less than, “If life in 2050, with AI, doesn’t totally suck, why?” The mind-bending clarity of this question leaves little room for error. Armed with buzzing synaptic networks and the overwhelming wisdom only a lifetime of academia can build, these fellows are expected to solve pretty much everything by lunchtime.
First up, David Autor, the maestro of monetizing misery, turns job space handwringing into award-worthy TED talks. His plan? Unleash AI in the job market arena, but this time in a supportive, ’80s training montage kind of way—envision robots handing humans lattes for a change.
Then there’s Sara Beery, whose life’s purpose is bending AI to save the pandas and watch birds frolic in HD. Her secret weapon? Instead of crunching numbers, she’s crunching data modalities—because if you can’t see through a long-tailed distribution, are you even monitoring biodiversity?
Joining them is Gabriele Farina, whose passion for playing intellectual Tetris with AI’s decision-making processes is only rivaled by his burning desire to pen academic papers that mere mortals couldn’t dare comprehend. “Game theory is just life with extra rules,” he quipped, probably.
Marzyeh Ghassemi plans to ensure medical AI doesn’t just become a smarter way to tell you you’re terminal. Her idea: design, develop, deploy—repeat. Like a health-conscious DJ remixing public policy based on beats per minute.
And finally Yoon Kim, whose cocktail of statistics and linguistics might just teach machines to speak human first, is determined to make machines less erratic. In his downtime, he reportedly teaches neural networks how to binge-watch series without crashing.
Rounding out this noble conclave are alumni Roger Grosse and David Rolnick, whose contributions to AI remain so vital they must be included despite whatever plan we hatched earlier. Because let’s be honest, if ‘alumni clout’ were currency, Rolnick and Grosse would own private islands.
These intrepid fellowship fellows face the arduous task of turning AI into the Swiss Army knife of the future—sharp but unlikely to cut society’s fingers off. And while they’ve yet to be fitted for futuristic spandex costumes, one can only imagine that’s next on Schmidt’s philanthropic to-do list.
