We must understand systemic inequalities so we can understand why and how to correct them. From both stories, we see how exclusion is less productive than inclusion. Leaving up barriers to women’s education means missing out on women’s potential contributions. Destroying public facilities out of hatred destroys them for everyone. If the goal is to maximize equality of opportunity for most people in a society, it would serve us to design our world inclusively. But how do we get there from where we are now? How do we design for inclusivity, especially when we have to work within what past generations left us?
Selam Gano ’18
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
Inclusivity can be thought of as recursive: the way we get to an inclusively designed world is by including more people in the design process. But it’s difficult to recruit people into environments not initially designed for them. This issue is always top of mind at MIT Admissions, which develops an annual video to announce that admission decisions will be released on 3/14, or Pi Day. In 2017, when I was a student member of the team creating the video, Marvel had just introduced a new character named Riri Williams, a Black MIT student who lived in Simmons Hall and went on to become Iron Man’s successor. We thought she would be a great theme for that year’s video, illustrating how MIT was a place for people like her. In our video Riri was played by my classmate Ayomide Fatunde ’18, while Cowboy Lynk ’20 and Loren Sherman ’17 produced the incredible special effects. I was co-director/producer alongside Chris Peterson, SM ’13, now director of special projects at MIT Admissions.
The impact of our video was even bigger than we expected: Riri made the leap from a comic book to the big screen and was featured in Black Panther 2. This marked the first time an external entity had been allowed to film on MIT’s campus, and the movie pulled in over $850 million at the box office.
Representation is one facet of inclusivity, but real inclusion requires more than that. I elaborated on this concept and the role of the Pi Day video during a 2022 TEDxMIT talk. Inclusion must go beyond merely selecting people with a particular identity. The first women who attended MIT faced structural, discriminatory barriers to their success, including but not limited to the lack of bathrooms. Real inclusivity involves rooting out these inequalities and asking challenging, uncomfortable questions about how systems are designed.
I find parallels in MIT’s engineering education. In project-based courses and research, critique is celebrated, and it’s given thoughtfully in a good-faith effort to improve results. There is general agreement that critical dialogue always results in better outcomes. The Institute took this same position in the“MIT and Slavery”project, which aims to research MIT’s historical relationship with the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Started in 2017, it was one of the first such efforts among peer institutions, and it illustrates how our culture of critique also requires setting aside shame. Shame isn’t productive or useful; it causes us to get defensive or shut down. Without it, we can shift our focus to making positive change, and efforts to right past wrongs become far easier.
Real inclusivity involves rooting out inequalities and asking challenging, uncomfortable questions about how systems are designed.
Long before the slavery project, the women of MIT CSAIL published a watershed report in 1983 titled “Barriers to Equality in Academia.” The report outlined the obstacles they faced, including sexual harassment and other forms of workplace discrimination. It also included comments from male colleagues who were willing to work to be part of a solution. These women succeeded by banding together and finding strength in their community. This is another important way that marginalized groups create change, especially when the odds are against them.
In STEM fields, we design the future, and we want that future designed by most of us, for most of us, rather than by—and historically for—only the most advantaged among us. Though modern social issues may offer ample cause for dismay, social progress is not so different from scientific progress. Just as innovation has always required a scientific community working together, so too are a wide range of people necessary for social progress. We need academics and activists to describe issues and create frameworks, journalists to report on them, artists to express these ideas, and all of us to be active participants in civic life.
If we set aside shame, celebrate critique, and band together, then collectively, we can be like the superheroes we idolize—except we are real people. We don’t need to be bitten by a radioactive spider to act. We need inclusive collaboration. In the real world, our superpower is simply waking up each day and believing that positive change is possible, that we can all make important contributions. With all the challenges we face today, that is true heroism.
Selam Gano ’18 is a robotics engineer. She will begin a graduate program at Carnegie Mellon in the fall as a GEM Fellow and a Wade Scholar.
The first step to finding out is to catalogue what microbes we might have lost. To get as close to ancient microbiomes as possible, microbiologists have begun studying multiple Indigenous groups. Two have received the most attention: the Yanomami of the Amazon rainforest and the Hadza, in northern Tanzania.
Researchers have made some startling discoveries already. A study by Sonnenburg and his colleagues, published in July, found that the gut microbiomes of the Hadza appear to include bugs that aren’t seen elsewhere—around 20% of the microbe genomes identified had not been recorded in a global catalogue of over 200,000 such genomes. The researchers found 8.4 million protein families in the guts of the 167 Hadza people they studied. Over half of them had not previously been identified in the human gut.
Plenty of other studies published in the last decade or so have helped build a picture of how the diets and lifestyles of hunter-gatherer societies influence the microbiome, and scientists have speculated on what this means for those living in more industrialized societies. But these revelations have come at a price.
A changing way of life
The Hadza people hunt wild animals and forage for fruit and honey. “We still live the ancient way of life, with arrows and old knives,” says Mangola, who works with the Olanakwe Community Fund to support education and economic projects for the Hadza. Hunters seek out food in the bush, which might include baboons, vervet monkeys, guinea fowl, kudu, porcupines, or dik-dik. Gatherers collect fruits, vegetables, and honey.
Mangola, who has met with multiple scientists over the years and participated in many research projects, has witnessed firsthand the impact of such research on his community. Much of it has been positive. But not all researchers act thoughtfully and ethically, he says, and some have exploited or harmed the community.
One enduring problem, says Mangola, is that scientists have tended to come and study the Hadza without properly explaining their research or their results. They arrive from Europe or the US, accompanied by guides, and collect feces, blood, hair, and other biological samples. Often, the people giving up these samples don’t know what they will be used for, says Mangola. Scientists get their results and publish them without returning to share them. “You tell the world [what you’ve discovered]—why can’t you come back to Tanzania to tell the Hadza?” asks Mangola. “It would bring meaning and excitement to the community,” he says.
Some scientists have talked about the Hadza as if they were living fossils, says Alyssa Crittenden, a nutritional anthropologist and biologist at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, who has been studying and working with the Hadza for the last two decades.
The Hadza have been described as being “locked in time,” she adds, but characterizations like that don’t reflect reality. She has made many trips to Tanzania and seen for herself how life has changed. Tourists flock to the region. Roads have been built. Charities have helped the Hadza secure land rights. Mangola went abroad for his education: he has a law degree and a master’s from the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy program at the University of Arizona.
Over the last couple of decades, scientists have come to realize just how important the microbes that crawl all over us are to our health. But some believe our microbiomes are in crisis—casualties of an increasingly sanitized way of life. Disturbances in the collections of microbes we host have been associated with a whole host of diseases, ranging from arthritis to Alzheimer’s.
Some might not be completely gone, though. Scientists believe many might still be hiding inside the intestines of people who don’t live in the polluted, processed environment that most of the rest of us share. They’ve been studying the feces of people like the Yanomami, an Indigenous group in the Amazon, who appear to still have some of the microbes that other people have lost.
But there is a major catch: we don’t know whether those in hunter-gatherer societies really do have “healthier” microbiomes—and if they do, whether the benefits could be shared with others. At the same time, members of the communities being studied are concerned about the risk of what’s called biopiracy—taking natural resources from poorer countries for the benefit of wealthier ones. Read the full story.
—Jessica Hamzelou
Eric Schmidt has a 6-point plan for fighting election misinformation
—by Eric Schmidt, formerly the CEO of Google, and current cofounder of philanthropic initiative Schmidt Futures
The coming year will be one of seismic political shifts. Over 4 billion people will head to the polls in countries including the United States, Taiwan, India, and Indonesia, making 2024 the biggest election year in history.
Generative AI’s ability to harness customer data in a highly sophisticated manner means enterprises are accelerating plans to invest in and leverage the technology’s capabilities. In a study titled “The Future of Enterprise Data & AI,” Corinium Intelligence and WNS Triange surveyed 100 global C-suite leaders and decision-makers specializing in AI, analytics, and data. Seventy-six percent of the respondents said that their organizations are already using or planning to use generative AI.
According to McKinsey, while generative AI will affect most business functions, “four of them will likely account for 75% of the total annual value it can deliver.” Among these are marketing and sales and customer operations. Yet, despite the technology’s benefits, many leaders are unsure about the right approach to take and mindful of the risks associated with large investments.
Mapping out a generative AI pathway
One of the first challenges organizations need to overcome is senior leadership alignment. “You need the necessary strategy; you need the ability to have the necessary buy-in of people,” says Ayer. “You need to make sure that you’ve got the right use case and business case for each one of them.” In other words, a clearly defined roadmap and precise business objectives are as crucial as understanding whether a process is amenable to the use of generative AI.
The implementation of a generative AI strategy can take time. According to Ayer, business leaders should maintain a realistic perspective on the duration required for formulating a strategy, conduct necessary training across various teams and functions, and identify the areas of value addition. And for any generative AI deployment to work seamlessly, the right data ecosystems must be in place.
Ayer cites WNS Triange’s collaboration with an insurer to create a claims process by leveraging generative AI. Thanks to the new technology, the insurer can immediately assess the severity of a vehicle’s damage from an accident and make a claims recommendation based on the unstructured data provided by the client. “Because this can be immediately assessed by a surveyor and they can reach a recommendation quickly, this instantly improves the insurer’s ability to satisfy their policyholders and reduce the claims processing time,” Ayer explains.
All that, however, would not be possible without data on past claims history, repair costs, transaction data, and other necessary data sets to extract clear value from generative AI analysis. “Be very clear about data sufficiency. Don’t jump into a program where eventually you realize you don’t have the necessary data,” Ayer says.
The benefits of third-party experience
Enterprises are increasingly aware that they must embrace generative AI, but knowing where to begin is another thing. “You start off wanting to make sure you don’t repeat mistakes other people have made,” says Ayer. An external provider can help organizations avoid those mistakes and leverage best practices and frameworks for testing and defining explainability and benchmarks for return on investment (ROI).
Using pre-built solutions by external partners can expedite time to market and increase a generative AI program’s value. These solutions can harness pre-built industry-specific generative AI platforms to accelerate deployment. “Generative AI programs can be extremely complicated,” Ayer points out. “There are a lot of infrastructure requirements, touch points with customers, and internal regulations. Organizations will also have to consider using pre-built solutions to accelerate speed to value. Third-party service providers bring the expertise of having an integrated approach to all these elements.”
