Michael J. Thate, Senior Fellow for Human Transformations. Michael's work concerns what escapes measurement, and the restless ingenuity with which we build provisional instruments to measure it anyway.

Raised in rural southwest Minnesota, he holds a doctorate in ethical philosophy and religious studies from Durham University. He was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship at Tübingen, lectured at Yale Divinity School, and held fellowships at Harvard's Center for the Study of World Religions and at the Département de Philosophie of the École normale supérieure, Paris. His books—Remembrance of Things Past? (Mohr Siebeck) and The Godman and the Sea (University of Pennsylvania Press)—ask how communities come to know what resists being made explicit, and what is lost when such knowledge is finally forced into a system.

His technical training follows these questions into the instruments themselves. He holds an M.S.L. from Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and is completing a doctorate in systems engineering at George Washington University, where he is an NSF-funded fellow in Developing Trustworthy A.I. Systems, working on human–A.I. interaction. He has further training in systems design at MIT Sloan, GIS at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and computer engineering through the NYU Tandon Bridge Program. Before joining the MIT community, he spent twelve years at Princeton University as Research Scholar for Responsible Tech, Innovation, and Policy, teaching engineering ethics to doctoral students in SEAS and the history of entrepreneurship in the Keller Center for Innovation—the latter recognized with the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence.

His current work engages A.I. governance, biotechnical ethics, the attention economy, and the legal and theological problem of human distinctiveness.