A Moment to Be Amazed Spring 2025

In 2011, I got a chance to see one of the last space shuttle launches. A NASA program to harness the growing power of Twitter picked enthusiasts for special access to major space agency events in exchange for a continuous stream of tweets. Within days of getting my invitation, I’d bought a plane ticket and signed up to stay in a house with strangers I’d met on the internet.

What happened next was an incredible experience made possible by social media. My housemates were NASA and European Space Agency engineers, science teachers and journalists. We toured sites like the awe-inspiring VAB — one of the largest buildings in the world — which held the Saturn V rocket that launched the Apollo missions to the moon. We met astronauts, scientists and celebrities, and posted photos by the iconic countdown clock.

After a week of delays, I had to return to Oregon, but I was invited back to see the very last launch, Atlantis. Even three miles from the launchpad, the shock waves shook my whole body. I tweeted: “Beautiful, mind-bending: this tiny toy rises up on flames carrying humans inside, pierces the sky and disappears.”

Back then, social media seemed to be pure connection — to people with shared interests, to high school and college friends you’d lost touch with, to an endless supply of cat videos. The trolls and bots and extremists hadn’t joined us in full force yet. 

All that’s to say that when it comes to technology, many of us have seen something that starts off great go sideways — because technology gets used by people, and people are complicated. So I realize that even with adorable robots on the cover, you may have had mixed feelings when you saw that this Stater delves into Oregon State’s impact on artificial intelligence.

It’s true we don’t yet know all the challenges to come, but for the span of these pages, I invite you to set that aside and be amazed. Because AI — the engineering, the sheer intellectual creativity of it — is an extraordinary accomplishment, and Beavers have helped make it happen.

From teaching robots to walk (and run!) to making chatbots that help doctors diagnose rare diseases, our researchers are already using AI to accomplish dazzling feats. And once the Jen-Hsun Huang and Lori Mills Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex is complete and they have access to one of the most powerful supercomputers in the nation, the acceleration of scientific discovery here is bound to be astonishing.

Can we use this technology to find our way out of problems instead of just into new ones? That’s what our university is banking on. After talking with Oregon State scientists about their work, I’m willing to embrace the wonder. I hope you will be, too.