MIT Open Aggregated Podcast Feed

MIT Open Aggregated Podcast Feed

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MIT Open Aggregated Podcast Feed episodes

  • Digitally Savvy Boards: AI Update
    Stephanie Woerner reads MIT CISR's March 2025 research briefing, which she co-authored with Peter Weill, Jennifer S. Banner, and James Moore. See the text version and related content at https://cisr.mit.edu/publication/2025_0301_SavvyBoardsUpdate_WeillWoernerBannerMoore
    Abstract: In 2019, MIT CISR published findings from our research on the digital savviness of company boards that showed 24 percent of boards were digitally savvy and had associated performance premiums. In 2024, we repeated the 2019 board analysis with current companies and found that having a digitally savvy board based on our original criteria was no longer differentiating. However, updating the criteria to account for newer technologies produced results similar to the original analysis. In this briefing we compare the results of these two studies, share insights from interviews of non-executive board directors, and explore how companies use board committees to help manage their work.
    14 min
  • A Philosophy of Echoes
    We spend our 50th episode (the last of this season) with communication theorist Amit Pinchevski. Amit’s recent book Echo (MIT Press) explores its topic through mythology, etymology, history, technology, and philosophy. The book challenges the notion that echo is mere repetition. Instead, Pinchevski argues, echo is a generative medium that creatively expresses our relations to others and the world around us. Just as a baby first learns to speak by repeating the sounds of others, a philosophy of echoes reminds us that our own agency and creativity reside in repetitions that respond to the past. 
    For our Patreon members we the full two-hour conversation with Amit’s “What’s Good” segment. Join at patreon.com/phantompower. 
    Amit Pinchevski is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests are in theory and philosophy of communication and media, focusing specifically on the ethical aspects of the limits of communication; media witnessing, memory and trauma; and pathologies of communication and their construction.
    He is the author of By Way of Interruption: Levinas and the Ethics of Communication (Duquesne UP, 2005), Transmitted Wounds: Media and the Mediation of Trauma (Oxford UP, 2019), and Echo (MIT Press, 2022). He is co-editor of Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication (with P. Frosh; Palgrave, 2009) and Ethics of Media (with N. Couldry and M. Madianou; Palgrave, 2013). His work has appeared in academic journals such as Critical Inquiry, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Cultural Critique, Cultural Studies, Public Culture, New Media & Society, and Theory, Culture & Society.
    Today’s show was written and edited by Mack Hagood. 
    Original music by Graeme Gibson
    1 hr 2 min
  • Mia Consalvo et al., "Streaming by the Rest of Us: Microstreaming Videogames on Twitch" (MIT Press, 2025)
    The vast majority of people who stream themselves playing videogames online do so with few or no viewers. In Streaming by the Rest of Us: Microstreaming Videogames on Twitch (MIT Press, 2025) Dr. Mia Consalvo, Dr. Marc Lajeunesse, and Dr. Andrei Zanescu investigate who they are, why they do so, and why this form of leisure activity is important to understand. Unlike the esports athletes and streaming superstars who receive the lion's share of journalistic and academic attention, microstreamers are not in it for the money and barely have an audience. In this, the first book dedicated to the latter group, the authors gather interviews from dozens of microstreamers from 2017 to 2019 to discuss their lives, struggles, hopes, and goals.
    For readers interested in livestreaming, and Twitch in particular, the book rethinks the medium's history through accounts of the everyday uses of webcams, with particular attention to notions of liveness and authenticity. These two concepts have become calling cards for the videogame livestreaming platform and underlie streamer motivations, the construction of their practices (whether casual, serious, or anywhere in between), and the complex “metas” that take shape over time. The book also looks at the authors' own practices of livestreaming, focusing on what can be gained through experiencing the lived reality of the practice. Finally, the authors explain how Twitch's platform (studied from 2017–2023) informs how streamers structure their every day and how corporate ideologies bleed into real-world spaces like TwitchCon.
    This book is available open-access via the MIT Press website.
    This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
    41 min
  • M. Chirimuuta, "The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience" (MIT Press, 2024)
    This book is available open access here. 
    The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience (MIT Press, 2024), Mazviita Chirimuuta argues that the standard ways neuroscientists simplify the human brain to build models for their research purposes mislead us about how the brain actually works. The key issue, instead, is to figure out which details of brain function are relevant for understanding its role in causing behavior; after all, the biological brain is a highly energetically efficient basis of cognition in contrast to the massive data centers driving AI that are based on the simplification that brain functionality is just a matter of neuronal action potentials. Chirimuuta, who is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, also argues for a Kantian-inspired view of neuroscientific knowledge called haptic realism, according to which what we can know about the brain is the product of interaction between brains and the scientific methods and aims that guide how we investigate them.
    50 min
  • Lessons on Living with AI from the Home Computer Revolution: Revisiting Sherry Turkle’s “The Second Self”
    It’s the UConn Popcast, and we've been experiencing a revolution in the past few years, as artificial intelligence becomes an increasingly common part of everyday life. Powerful AI tools are now integrated into our work, our schools, our creative industries, and our experiences of dating and companionship. This is a disorientating experience, one that changes not only our views of technology, but of ourselves. Can we look to a past technological revolution for help?  
    We revisit Sherry Turkle's classic text The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (MIT Press, 1985) on how the sudden spread of the personal computer through society in the 1980s similarly challenged the human relationship to technology. What can Turkle's text, which combined the fields of ethnography, psychoanalysis, and technology and society, tell us about today's AI revolution?
    56 min
  • Nutrition Tips for Managing Hypertension or Diabetes

    “Conversations with MIT Health” presents “Nutrition Tips for Managing Hypertension or Diabetes,” featuring Dr. David Podradchik, clinical pharmacist at MIT Health. Dr. Podradchik offers practical guidance on making sustainable dietary changes to better manage blood pressure and blood sugar. He discusses common nutrition challenges, simple adjustments that can have a big impact, and how diet interacts with medications. Listeners will gain insight into working with their care team to develop a personalized plan for long-term health.

    12 min
  • Hasn't the climate changed before?

    The Earth has gone through massive climate change before—many times over, in fact!—but human civilization has not. Prof. David McGee, a specialist in the study of ancient climates, joins the show to explain what came before the 10,000 years of global stability in which complex human societies emerged and grew. Along the way, we explore the scientific tools used to study the distant past, the great cycles of the ice ages, and what it can all tell us about the climate change we’re experiencing today.

    For a deeper dive and additional resources related to this episode, visit: https://climate.mit.edu/podcasts/e2-hasnt-climate-changed

    For more episodes of TILclimate by the MIT Climate Project, visit tilclimate.mit.edu. 

    Credits

    Laur Hesse Fisher, Host and Senior Editor

    Aaron Krol, Writer and Executive Producer

    David Lishansky, Editor and Producer

    Grace Sawin, Student Production Assistant

    Michelle Harris, Fact Checker

    Music by Blue Dot Sessions

    Artwork by Aaron Krol

    16 min
  • The Role of Online Education in Upskilling the Workforce

    In recent years, online education has come to the forefront as an alternative to traditional education programs. Its increasing prominence reflects its adaptability, flexibility, affordability, and far-reaching scale. As the global workforce stands to undergo significant changes in the next 5-10 years due to digitalization, advancements in AI, and automation, employers are increasingly valuing skills over degrees. For workers, this requires a practice of continuous learning.

    In this episode, we’re joined by Dr. Eva Ponce, Director of Online Education at the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics, and Dr. Inma Borrella, Academic Lead for the MITx MicroMasters Program in Supply Chain Management. Eva and Inma discuss the role of online education in upskilling the workforce and the impact of the MITx MicroMasters Program, the first of its kind.

    Host & Executive Producer: Benjy Kantor

    Marketing Writer & Producer: Mackenzie Berry
    Sound Editor: David Benjamin Sound
    Audio Engineer: Kurt Schneider

    38 min
  • Chris Higgins, "Undeclared: A Philosophy of Formative Higher Education" (MIT Press, 2024)
    Undeclared: A Philosophy of Formative Higher Education (MIT Press, 2024) is an imaginative tour of the contemporary university as it could be: a place to discover self-knowledge, meaning, and purpose.
    What if college were not just a means of acquiring credentials, but a place to pursue our formation as whole persons striving to lead lives of meaning and purpose? In Undeclared, Chris Higgins confronts the contemporary university in a bid to reclaim a formative mission for higher education. In a series of searching essays and pointed interludes, Higgins challenges us to acknowledge how far our practices have drifted from our ideals, asking: What would it look like to build a college from the ground up to support self-discovery and personal integration? What does it mean to be a public university, and are there any left? How can the humanities help the job-ified university begin to take vocation seriously?
    Cutting through the underbrush of received ideas, Higgins follows the insight where it leads, clearing a path from the corporate multiversity to the renaissance in higher education that was Black Mountain College and back again. Along the way, we tour a campus bent on becoming a shopping mall, accompany John Dewey through a midlife crisis, and witness the first "happening.” Through diverse and grounded philosophical engagements, Undeclared assembles the resources to expand the contemporary educational imagination.
    Chris Higgins is Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Formative Education in Boston College's Lynch School of Education and Human Development, where he directs the Transformative Educational Studies program. He is the author of The Good Life of Teaching.
    The book is available Open Access here.
    1 hr
  • Feed Drop: How AI Will Change Your Job: MIT’s David Autor
    Today’s episode is a bonus drop from our friends over at the MIT CSAIL Alliances podcast. We’ll back in two weeks for Season 11 of Me, Myself, and AI.
    David Autor, the Daniel (1972) and Gail Rubinfeld Professor, Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow in MIT’s Department of Economics, says that AI is “not like a calculator where you just punch in the numbers and get the right answer. It’s much harder to figure out how to be effective with it.” Offering unique insights into the future of work in an AI-powered world, Autor explains his biggest worries, the greatest upside scenarios, and how he believes we should be approaching AI as a tool, and addresses how AI will impact jobs like nursing and skilled trades. Read the episode transcript here.
    Studies and papers referenced in this conversation: 
    AI and Product Innovation
    AI and the Gender Gap
    Robotics and Nursing Homes
    CSAIL Alliances connects business and industry to the people and research of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Each month, the CSAIL podcast features cutting-edge MIT and CSAIL experts discussing their current research, challenges, and successes, as well as the potential impact of emerging tech. Follow the podcast here.
    Me, Myself, and AI is a collaborative podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group and is hosted by Sam Ransbotham and Shervin Khodabandeh. Our engineer is David Lishansky, and the coordinating producers are Allison Ryder and Alanna Hooper.
    Stay in touch with us by joining our LinkedIn group, AI for Leaders at mitsmr.com/AIforLeaders or by following Me, Myself, and AI on LinkedIn.
    We encourage you to rate and review our show. Your comments may be used in Me, Myself, and AI materials.
    40 min

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