** ATTENTION *** If you are interested in taking the course for credit or as a listener please fill out THIS FORM.
The first class will be 10:00am-12:30pm, on Tues Feb 3, 2026 in the MIT Media Lab, Room E15-341.
Building access is restricted to people with an MIT ID or TIM Tickets. If you need help getting access, email r-admin@media.mit.edu for help.
MIT equips and encourages its students and researchers to develop technology for a better future. But what is a better future? Especially with rapid changes in AI and other technologies: How do we know what sort of future we should be designing and developing? Who decides, and how?
This course will provide students the opportunity to step back and ask and ask themselves what sort of future is worth building. Topics will include how technology can be reshaped and used to promote aims such as human dignity, rights, and justice, from the perspective of multiple ethical, philosophical, and spiritual frameworks.
The class will engage subject leaders and experts representing technical fields that raise ethical questions, and ethical frameworks of both secular and religious varieties, to address the question: what does it mean to build a better future? Guest experts will be interviewed by the course instructors and students will engage in weekly discussions.
Tuesdays, 10:00am-12:30pm (lunch provided), Feb 3 - May 12, 2026
Class meets in person in the Media Lab, E15-341 (75 Amherst St; Cambridge, MA)
Course staff email: betterfuture-staff at media dot mit dot edu
Put MAS.S63 or MAS.Future in the subject line to speed the reply
This course was taught for the first time in 2024. It has roots in a course taught at Yale called "Life Worth Living" but we have been modifying it to apply to technological innovation at MIT.
Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”
Marc Andreessen, "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto"
Sherry Turkle, "Silicon Valley Fairy Dust"
L.M. Sacasas, "41 Questions Concerning Technology"
Andrew Marantz, "The Dark Side of Techno-Utopianism"
Robert Nozick, "The Experience Machine"
Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Virtues, the Unity of a Human Life and the Concept of a Tradition,” from After Virtue
Lydia Dugdale, "The Lost art of Dying" (selections)
Selections from sacred texts and theological reflections from the Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and Confucian traditions
Frameworks for values and ethics (e.g. Utilitarianism, Virtue, etc.)
Judeo-Christian and other religious approaches to "a better future"
AI imitating, augmenting, and replacing people and their jobs
Utopian and dystopian visions and what happened to them?
Human thriving, eudaimonia, well-being
Bio-ethics and engineering a better Human 2.0