Young adults growing up in the attention economy ' preparing for adult life, with social media and chatbots competing for their attention ' can easily fall into unhealthy relationships with digital platforms. But what if chatbots weren't mere distractions from real life' Could they be designed humanely, as moral partners whose digital goal is to be a social guide rather than an addictive escape' At MIT, a friendship between two professors ' one an anthropologist, the other a computer scientist ' led to creation of an undergraduate class that set out to find the answer to those questions. Combining the two seemingly disparate disciplines, the class encourages students to design artificial intelligence chatbots in humane ways that help users improve themselves. The class, 6.S061/21A.S02 (Humane User Experience Design, a.k.a. Humane UXD), is an upper-level computer science class cross-listed with anthropology. This unique cross-listing allows computer science majors to fulfill a humanities requirement while also pursuing their career objectives. The two professors use methods from linguistic anthropology to teach students how to integrate the interactional and interpersonal needs of humans into programming....

Whenever I taught my medical anthropology course, I noticed that students were most curious about the section of the course that deals with the uses of plants, fungi and other species for a range of medical purposes. Those purposes included healing, psychological well-being, ritual and spiritual awakening, to name a few. Once Connecticut, the state where I work, legalized recreational cannabis, I decided it was timely to take the plant section from the original course and expand it to a 14-week course of its own. It was also an opportunity to introduce students to the discipline of anthropology through a topic I knew many of them found interesting. I decided to focus on cannabis instead of the entire panoply of plants and other species, since it was the one plant being legalized in the state at that time. Throughout the course, we focus on the different cultural and political significance of cannabis in other geographical contexts. We look at the representation of cannabis in art, literature and pop culture, as well as what the science of cannabis tells us about its impact on health and well-being....

Rapid growth of the metaverse exposes a host of ethical concerns. Here's how an anthropological approach to data analysis can build a safer virtual world....