Abstract:

Technology and technologists have had and continue to have crucial roles to play in medicine, meeting energy demand, addressing climate change, k-12 education and in many other ways that affect our lives on Earth. My hope had been that we would have learned some lessons from the history of the evolution of the Internet and The Web that would lead to a responsible and accountable advance of any new technology into our social fabric. But I do not see much to give me the confidence that we have learned many useful lessons. Generative artificial intelligence, for example, has the potential to be supremely useful but also supremely abusive. Any new technology represents something of a double-edged sword. Its evolution is all about how people will choose to use it: for good purposes or bad. Consider the introduction of the automobile or telephone into our social fabric. GenAI is not any new technology. This one is shattering. But I suppose that to the average thoughtful person the telephone must have been shattering. Just as the Model T. What is different is the case of GenAI is that it does not just add a new dimension to our lives, it presents technology as a force beyond nature. I am concerned that this technology may be heading so far out front of humans that people may begin to broadly distrust science and technology on a level that is unprecedented today. That erosion of trust would be to our collective misfortune from my perspective. We must all be concerned about managing the introduction of any new technology into the marketplace in constructive and societally beneficial ways. This two-way conversation will consider how that might be accomplished in the future.

Bio:

R.M. Latanision is a Neil Armstrong Distinguished Visiting Professor at Purdue University. He held joint faculty appointments in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at MIT until joining the science and engineering consulting firm, Exponent, Inc., as a Corporate Vice- President and later as the firm’s first senior fellow. His research has primarily focused on the corrosion of metals, materials processing, and the behavior of materials in aqueous environments, including ambient and high-temperature/pressure conditions, and particularly in materials selection for advanced engineering systems and failure analysis. His work has covered processing technologies and electrochemical systems such as batteries, fuel cells, waste destruction, supercritical water power generation, stress corrosion cracking, hydrogen embrittlement, and photoelectrochemistry. He serves as the editor-in-chief of the NAE Quarterly, The Bridge. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is Fellow at NACE International, and of ASM International.  During an MIT sabbatical, Latanision served as a science advisor to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology. Additionally, he was a member of the Massachusetts Office of Science and Technology Advisory Committee, the National Materials Advisory Board of the National Research Council (NRC),^[  and the NRC's Standing Committee on Chemical Demilitarization. In June 2002, he was appointed by President George W. Bush to serve on the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board (NWTRB) and later reappointed for a second four-year term by President Barack Obama.