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In Circulation: Episode 3 (Funding Models, New Drugs for Neurodegenerative Diseases, and Insurance for Runners)
How closely should a nonprofit resemble a corporation? And what happens when a nonprofit operates more like a corporation than a nonprofit? The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard faces these questions after winning the ability to legally license their gene-editing technology, CRISPR-Cas9, earlier this year. As the Broad sells IP licenses for their CRISPR technology, many fear that lack of regulation could lead to some controversy with taxpayers. Think: using technology built on public funding to genetically modify crops.
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In Circulation: Episode 2 (AI, Diagnostic Testing, and Emojis)
While it’s easy to imagine asking a robot for the weather forecast, it’s a little more difficult to imagine asking a robot to diagnose a disease or prescribe a treatment plan. But robots may soon play an important role in our healthcare. In San Francisco, two research teams are exploring how AI-powered robots might impact senior care, introducing the idea of “connected aging.” Think robots that can remind you to take medication or suggest you go for a walk. While these solutions are undeniably helpful, they introduce a set of questions about what we should and shouldn’t train machines to do. In a thought-provoking long-form piece, Pulitzer Prizewinning Author, Siddhartha Mukherjee, answers a number of these questions as they relate to the use of AI for disease diagnosis. The question, he surmises, isn’t about what machines will or will not be capable of; rather, what should be automated, and what shouldn’t?
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In Circulation: Episode 1 (Privacy, Hype, Sensors and Dataviz)
Could your data ever be used against you in a court of law? That’s what a lot of people are asking after Amazon recently agreed to release user data from an Echo device involved in a murder trial. The device in the hot seat — the popular AI assistant named “Alexa,” may contain audio recordings of a man’s death in Arkansas. This case represents yet another chapter in the ongoing debate over whether data from our home devices can be used as courtroom evidence. Fitbit data has already seen its day in court as a part of a personal injury claim in 2014, and Alexa’s debut in court sparks some important questions about our private data: what are some of the unintended consequences of the data exhaust we leave behind in the form of cookies, log files, and the like? How could our own data be used against us?
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