The Media Lab, and the Future I Still Want to Build

Years before I became a finalist for Executive Director of the MIT Media Lab, its director helped change the course of my life.

I was working as a doctor when I got to know Joi Ito, who led the Lab at the time. We talked often, frequently in person, about gaming, technology, and society. I was captivated by the breadth of his knowledge and how clearly he could explain the connections between those subjects. His unconventional path opened up possibilities I hadn’t fully considered for myself.

He became one of very few people I’ve regarded as a real inspiration.

During hospital night shifts, I would walk the corridors reading Whiplash, the book he co-authored with Jeff Howe about navigating a world of accelerating change. Reading it was another way of spending time with the questions our conversations had opened up. I had a demanding profession and a clear path in front of me, but I was becoming increasingly excited by what I might build outside it.

One idea from our conversations stayed with me. When something ought to exist, it is easy to assume someone else will eventually make it happen. Perhaps they will have more experience, more resources, or a more obvious claim to the work. But if everyone waits for that person, change happens painfully slowly.

Joi helped me understand that my excitement about an idea could itself be a reason to act. I could start learning, building, and bringing people together around it.

I eventually left full-time medicine to pursue my own path. Those conversations were an important part of what gave me the conviction to make that change. The Media Lab came to represent something personal to me: a place where intellectual curiosity could become a way of working, and where an unconventional combination of interests could be an advantage.

Years later, an executive director at an MIT school and an MIT vice president independently recommended me to Media Lab leadership for its Executive Director search. Between October 2024 and April 2025, I went through the selection process, reached the final stage, and was described by MIT as one of its “top-ranked candidates.”

I took the opportunity seriously because of that history. I knew what the Lab had helped make possible in my own life. Preparing for the role meant asking what it could make possible for many more people, and what I would need to do to help it get there.

Back to the Future

I called my candidacy presentation Back to the Future.

I wanted the Lab to recapture the sense of possibility that had drawn me to it, while giving that ambition a direction suited to the world emerging around us. The question at the center of the presentation was:

What does the world need the Media Lab for next?

My answer concerned how we would live alongside increasingly capable machine intelligence. AI touches work, medicine, identity, education, and the ways people relate to one another. Decisions about its development are also decisions about the kind of society we want to inhabit.

A laboratory with the Media Lab’s range could bring people together who would otherwise approach those questions separately. A physician might see a clinical problem. An engineer might see a technical constraint. A designer might notice why nobody would use the solution. An artist might ask a question that changes what everyone else believes they are building.

That exchange was a large part of the appeal. I wanted to help create the conditions for those people to attempt work that would be difficult to undertake within any one discipline or company.

The deck covered several research directions. Four remain especially important to me.

The futures I wanted to pursue

AI, and the responsibility that comes with building it

I wanted the Lab to help shape how AI enters people’s lives.

That includes safety and governance, but those words can become abstract quickly. The questions become more interesting when you connect them to a decision someone has to make.

What should an AI system be allowed to decide on your behalf? How should it behave when your interests conflict with those of the company providing it? What happens when people become dependent on something they cannot meaningfully inspect or control?

These are research questions with consequences for product design, business models, and public policy. I wanted an institution that could move between those worlds, building enough to understand the technology while retaining the independence to question where it was going.

My proposal included closer relationships with companies working on these problems. Those relationships could provide resources and practical context, while the Lab could convene perspectives that might be missing from a company’s immediate priorities.

Digital representations of ourselves

One of the more speculative ideas in my deck explored AI that develops a detailed model of an individual’s thinking.

Imagine a system that understands how you approach a decision, what you value, and the context behind your preferences. Over time, it might become useful as a representative, a collaborator, or a way of examining your own thinking.

That possibility opens questions I find fascinating. What would it mean for such a system to represent you faithfully? Which parts of your judgment could it learn? Where would it misunderstand you? How would you recognize the difference?

It also raises questions about identity and legacy. We leave behind photographs, writing, recordings, and the memories other people carry. A responsive digital model would be a different kind of inheritance. What would we want it to preserve, and who should have authority over it?

The useful possibilities begin well before any claim about recreating consciousness. Even a limited system that helps someone communicate their intentions or preserve their knowledge could matter enormously.

My candidacy deck noted that we were slowly exploring aspects of this at SoWork. It remains a meeting point for several of my interests: AI, cognition, personal agency, and the ways technology changes our relationships.

Repairing the ways we relate to one another

Another section of the deck was called “Societal Repair.”

I was interested in political, generational, and gender divisions, and how those divisions can harden until people struggle to imagine good intentions on the other side. Once that happens, even a practical disagreement becomes difficult to resolve.

I wanted to explore whether we could build environments that help people recover some ability to understand and cooperate with one another. That could involve tools for dialogue, shared projects, or research into the conditions under which people form connections across group boundaries.

The design question matters. A platform can reward a cutting response, or it can create reasons to listen more closely. It can make someone’s most inflammatory statement their entire identity, or give people room to encounter one another more fully.

I don’t think any single piece of software resolves social division. But I do think the environments we create influence how people behave, and that we should take responsibility for studying those effects and trying to improve them.

A place that brings technology, design, and social inquiry together seemed well suited to that work.

Medicine, human capability, and longevity

My medical background gives these ambitions a particular direction.

I am interested in technologies that help people live longer, healthier lives and expand what they are physically able to do. The deck explored robotics, bioengineered tissues, precision medicine, AI, and wearable technologies as areas where different kinds of expertise could produce something valuable together.

There is a great deal of distance between an exciting demonstration and something that improves a person’s life. That distance interests me. It contains the questions of usefulness, reliability, access, and what someone actually needs when their health or independence is at stake.

I wanted to bring the curiosity of a builder and the judgment of a physician to the same conversation. What could we make possible? What would justify using it? How would we know that it helped?

AI, health, and longevity were central to the agenda I hoped to develop with the Lab. They remain central to the future I want to help build.

A childhood ambition in the appendix

The most personal idea in the presentation was human flight.

I felt different growing up, and I identified with Superman. He gave that feeling somewhere to go. He also made me dream of flying.

Later, Iron Man appealed to another part of me: the possibility of building extraordinary things, and the responsibility to use your abilities and resources to do something useful.

Those stories stayed with me. Flight became an ambition that I think of as my life’s work, even though I am deliberately not pursuing it now. My attention is on SoWork, coaching, acting, and being a doctor. There are things I want to do well in the present before giving that ambition the attention it would require.

I included it in the deck because it revealed something about the kind of place I hoped the Lab could be. Alongside urgent, practical work, I wanted room for questions that might take decades to answer.

Could people move freely through the three-dimensional world we inhabit? What would that require in propulsion, control, materials, and safety? What possibilities might open up along the way, even if the full ambition remained distant?

My presentation acknowledged how far away it was. I included it anyway. The dream has endured since childhood, and I would like it to have a place in the life I’m building.

Giving people the conditions to do extraordinary work

The research agenda was only part of the presentation. Much of it concerned funding, collaboration, culture, reputation, outreach, and the relationships that sustain an institution.

Those subjects are closely connected. Financial uncertainty affects what people feel able to attempt. Poor communication makes collaboration harder. A fragmented institution struggles to explain its purpose to the outside world, which makes it harder to attract the support needed for ambitious work.

I wanted to work on those conditions together.

I described my approach as a gardener’s approach: understand what each part of the garden needs to thrive, then make sure it has the resources and space to do so.

That meant getting to know the people and groups already there. Some might want to build companies. Others might want to publish, pursue a difficult research question, or experiment without an immediate commercial destination. The executive role would involve helping those different ambitions coexist within a healthy institution.

It would also require a willingness to do the practical work personally. During the candidacy, I was already having conversations about prospective funding and partnerships. I wanted to bring resources and relationships to the opportunity, alongside a vision.

One slide described the ultimate aim as reviving the Lab’s “magic and wonder.” That phrase was personal. I knew what it felt like to encounter the place from the outside and have it expand your sense of what a life could contain.

I wanted more people to experience that. I also knew that making it possible would require sustained, unglamorous work.

Getting closer to the institution

As part of the process, I spoke with faculty, staff, and students. I wanted to understand how they experienced the Lab, what was working, and what they needed from its next executive leader.

The closer I looked, the more the practical shape of the opportunity changed.

I came away concerned about funding, institutional politics, and the willingness to undertake substantial change. Conversations about students’ research support and their experience of the institution stayed with me. So did the question of whether there was enough shared appetite to move beyond maintaining the existing arrangement.

My deck captured both my optimism and my concerns. It proposed an ambitious future while identifying funding needs, internal silos, and reputational work that would have to be addressed.

I was prepared for difficult work. What became less clear to me was whether the institution was ready to undertake that work collectively.

That distinction mattered. An executive director can raise money, build relationships, and help remove obstacles. Meaningful renewal also requires people across the institution to want it and participate in it.

I began to think that restoring the Lab’s financial footing and reputation could occupy the first several years. Carrying out the agenda that had drawn me to the opportunity might take another five.

That realization changed the question I was asking myself. I had begun by imagining what we could build. I was now considering how much of my life would be spent creating the conditions to begin.

There was also the prospect of another Boston winter. Having lived there before, I felt entitled to include that in the calculation.

The path that continued

MIT ultimately selected another candidate, and I was subsequently asked to help with funding.

By then, the process had changed how I saw the opportunity. The Lab had helped inspire the life I was building, but leading it would have meant setting much of that life aside for years of institutional rebuilding.

Back at SoWork, I had momentum, autonomy, and work I was excited to pursue. As the company has become more financially rewarding, I’ve also come to appreciate what that combination makes possible. I can direct my energy toward ideas I care about while continuing to make room for coaching, acting, and medicine.

With some distance, I’ve become increasingly glad that my path continued here.

I still think about the Lab. Its influence on me was substantial, and spending months seriously considering its future only deepened my interest in what it could become. There are people, questions, and possibilities there that I continue to care about.

I can value those things and also recognize how much I value the freedom I have today.

An open door

I haven’t closed the door on leading the Media Lab someday.

I would need to see a firmer financial foundation and a shared willingness to pursue meaningful change. I would want confidence that faculty, staff, and leadership were ready to build an ambitious future together, with enough stability to sustain the effort.

Under those conditions, I could imagine being excited by the opportunity again.

For now, my attention is on SoWork and the life I’m building around it. The questions that animated my candidacy remain with me: how AI can serve people, how technology might extend our lives and capabilities, and how we can create better ways of living and working together.

Years ago, in conversations with Joi and while reading Whiplash on hospital night shifts, I began to understand that I could take responsibility for pursuing the things I wanted to see in the world.

The search brought me back to that lesson. The work can happen in more than one place.

Today, I’m glad to be doing it here.