"Policies have changed on paper, yet attitudes inside banks have not caught up," said associate dean for innovation Fiona Murray. "Companies still face questions about whether they are ethical or ESG-compliant." Because banks must hold more capital against riskier loans, they often preferred to give credit to companies not involved in defence, Murray said.

The corporate alternative minimum tax (CAMT) was designed to be a floor so that large, profitable companies had to pay something. Many tax experts worry that it is too complicated and relies on accounting definitions of income that don't necessarily work well for tax law. "It's working like it's supposed to work," said professor Michelle Hanlon. "It's just a bad law."

These days, a lot of workers have been asking themselves whether AI is coming for their jobs. In a recent paper professor Roberto Rigobon and postdoctoral researcher Isabella Loaiza-Saa (SM '19, PhD '23) came up with a measure of how much AI might be used to augment selected jobs and then calculated a measure of the risk of being replaced by AI.

"If I had my druthers, we would get rid of net-metering, have a smart way to price electricity imports and exports, and then get rid of the cap," said Christopher Knittel, associate dean for climate and sustainability. "But what I worry about in the absence of a cap is a bunch of wealthy towns building a lot of solar and then transferring their transmission and distribution costs to the poorer towns that don't have the means to build as much solar."

Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu said society generally has two paths forward regarding AI. If companies largely use the technology to automate work, he expects there will be fewer jobs. "I'm not predicting a job apocalypse in the next year or five years," he said. "But if AI pervasively goes into an automation direction, there will be fewer jobs. There'll be some job creation, but not enough."

Gracy Chen (MBA '24) said: "I got my MBA from MIT, as I am a firm believer of life-long learning, plus there was the huge attraction of studying in the US and being exposed to the tech world. In 2022, I joined Bitget as a Managing Director, after co-founding a couple of tech start-ups. In 2024, the Bitget board asked me to step up to the CEO role. I am the only woman leading a Top 10 exchange."

Principal research scientist Neil Thompson said: "The trick for reporters over the coming years will be how to harness the positive productivity-improving aspects of AI while keeping the bedrock of trust intact."

Professor Catherine Wolfram said: "The coalition will be important as a vehicle for building trust, so that countries understand what each other's carbon policies are, but there's also technical work to be done. For example, we need to think about how to compare countries that have carbon pricing implemented for a carbon market and those that have a pricing policy implemented only with a tax or fee."

In his book "The Hype Machine," professor Sinan Aral argued that the combination of social media, smartphones, and machine intelligence is designed to exploit weaknesses in human psychology and behavior. From there, this "hype machine" silently affects the way we shop, date, read the news, exercise, and even do charity.