Juan Orbea

Two quiet revolutions: reading/writing DNA. The ability to read DNA has greatly exceeded Moore's Law. Your genome can now be sequenced for $100 (which used to cost billions only 25 years ago).

Most people like to think of themselves as good people. Most people in first world countries have the opportunity to have a tremendous impact on other people's lives. If you earn more than $35k per year, you are in the top 1% of earners worldwide. This puts you in a great position to do good.

"On or about December 1910 human character changed," Virginia Woolf famously declared. Gone, she wrote, were the old certainties, the old manners, the deference to nineteenth-century authority. Instead human beings—at least the ones in Woolf's circle—were starting to see the world as full of chaos and discontinuity. Einstein smashed the notion of... See more

Human and Machine IntelligenceStudents will learn to tackle the challenges of designing and building artificial intelligent systems that attain or exceed human-level performance in complex tasks. Suggested subjects are 6.034, 6.006 and 6.009.

According to legend, in 1876 the first sounds transmitted down a wire were Alexander Graham Bell saying "Mr. Watson, come here. I want you." Compared with Morse's "What hath God wrought!'' this is disappointingly banal—as if Neil Armstrong, setting foot on the moon, had uttered the words: "Buzz, could you toss me that rock hammer?'' It's as though... See more