MIT CISR Annual Research Forum 2026

"Keep a human in the loop" has become the standard reassurance of the AI era. But it leaves a critical question unanswered: What is the human supposed to contribute? As AI becomes increasingly capable, it forces a reckoning with what makes us uniquely human, and how we can best partner with it. We are still responsible for how we show up in relationships, the values that we stand for, how we guide what we create, and what we decide to use AI for in the first place. In this talk, Kate will argue that four distinctly human capacities become more—not less—important in the age of AI: presence, character, judgment, and purpose. Underlying all four is a faculty we've spent centuries training ourselves to override just as it becomes a competitive advantage: intuition, the ability to sense what's happening inside our own bodies, the quiet sense of rightness or wrongness that often arrives before conscious reasoning catches up. Intuition is not the opposite of rigor. It is another source of information that can be trained, tested, and integrated with analysis. The future may depend less on keeping a human in the loop than on understanding what the human is there to do and making sure we’re prepared to do it.