By Mackenzie White

As the MIT Media Lab marks its first four decades, new leadership, adventurous research, and the most consequential ­technology in a generation are converging.

Being digital and being human

The Media Lab opened in 1985, the year after Apple launched the Macintosh and just as MIDI, the evolving standard that allows digital instruments and computers to communicate, was becoming part of the infrastructure of electronic music. The lab’s founders—Nicholas Negroponte ’66, MArch ’66, a young professor of computer graphics with a contrarian streak, and Jerome Wiesner, a former MIT president—believed that computers would become creative and communicative tools, changing how people made art, shared information, learned, and understood the world.

“What’s the future of being a human being? That’s the question everybody here is asking.”

Tod Machover

Then, in September, Jessica Rosenworcel became the lab’s executive director after stepping down as chair of the Federal Communications Commission. At the FCC, she was accustomed to seeing technology deployed in ways that were already shaping public life for better and worse. For example, the ability to move data across networks underpins much of the modern economy, but she also saw that technology being used to generate robocalls, in one case even turning a clone of President Biden’s voice into a tool for election interference. At the Media Lab, she’d get a chance to help steer new technologies in positive directions. 

“This is a place invested in the idea that if technology is changing, we should wrestle with it and figure out what good we can do for humanity,” she says.