Prof. David Autor speaks with PBS host Walter Isaacson about the fear surrounding AI’s impact in the workforce and his view that AI could provide new opportunities for middle class workers. “Most of the time, technology is good for the elite and not so good for everybody else,” says Autor. “[AI] is a case where the technology might compete a little bit more with the elite and enable more people to do valuable work,” resulting in higher wages and more job opportunity for the middle class.
Prof. Amy Finkelstein speaks with New York Times reporter Sarah Kliff about “the impact of medical debt relief on individuals.” “The idea that maybe we could get rid of medical debt, and it wouldn’t cost that much money but it would make a big difference, was appealing,” says Finkelstein. “What we learned, unfortunately, is that it doesn’t look like it has much of an impact.”
Jonathan Levin PhD '99 has been named the next president of Stanford University, reports Stephanie Saul for The New York Times. Levin’s “research has been wide-ranging, covering topics such as early admissions at selective colleges, subprime lending and the impact of financial incentives on health and health care delivery,” writes Saul. “As dean, Dr. Levin has promoted educating business entrepreneurs in developing countries through a program called Stanford Seed.”
Fast Company reporter Shalene Gupta spotlights new research by Prof. David Autor that finds “about 60% of jobs in 2018 did not exist 1940. Since 1940, the bulk of new jobs has shifted from middle-class production and clerical jobs to high-paid professional jobs and low-paid service jobs.” Additionally, the researchers uncovered evidence that “automation eroded twice as many jobs from 1980 to 2018 as it had from 1940 to 1980. While augmentation did add some jobs to the economy, it was not as many as the ones lost by automation.”
Prof. David Autor speaks with New York Times reporter Steve Lohr about his hope that AI can be harnessed to become “worker complementary technology,” enabling individuals to take on more highly skilled work and find better paying jobs. “I do think there is value in imagining a positive outcome, encouraging debate and preparing for a better future,” Autor explains. “This technology is a tool, and how we decide to use it is up to us.”
Forbes reporter Oludolapo Makinde spotlights research by Prof. Daron Acemoglu and Prof. Simon Johnson that explores the impact of AI on the workforce. “Instead of aiming to create artificial superintelligence or AI systems that outperform humans, [Acemoglu and Johnson] propose shifting the focus to supporting workers,” writes Makinde.
Graduate student Dhruv Gaur speaks with Boston.com reporter Lauren Daley about his viral message expressing support for Alex Trebek when he competed on “Jeopardy” in 2019, and his experience being invited back for the show’s first invitational tournament. “I listened to a ton of podcasts — old pop culture from the ‘70s ‘80s and ‘90s; history, Shakespeare,” says Gaur of how he prepared for the tournament. “I got really into quiz games on my phone or computer. I was shocked that nobody realized what I was doing because anytime I got a free second I’d be doing a quiz, or asking friends to go to bar trivia.”
Writing for The Hill, Sloan Prof. Catherine Wolfram and UCLA Prof. Kimberly Clausing explore why they feel U.S. politicians should embrace carbon pricing. “2025 will be a big year for Congress to tackle longstanding fiscal issues and further climate policy efforts,” they write. “Before this can happen, politicians need to hear timely arguments backed by up-to-date evidence.”
Prof. Jonathan Gruber speaks with Marketplace reporter Matt Levin about the potential impact of raising the retirement age in the United States. Gruber suggests a new system where retirement age would vary by income. “People who are sufficiently high income, should be expected to work longer and get less in the system,” says Gruber. “People with physically demanding jobs and low income should be able to retire earlier.”
Prof. David Autor speaks with Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast hosts Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway about how AI could be leveraged to improve inequality, emphasizing the policy choices governments will need to make to ensure the technology is beneficial to humans. “Automation is not the primary source of how innovation improves our lives,” says Autor. “Many of the things we do with new tools is create new capabilities that we didn’t previously have.”
Washington Post columnist Eduardo Porter spotlights various MIT research efforts aimed at ensuring that AI is used to empower human workers rather than replace them. Prof. David Autor notes: “AI, if used well, can assist with restoring the middle-skill, middle-class heart of the U.S. labor market that has been hollowed out by automation and globalization.”
Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have found that high exposure to implausible and outlandish false claims can increase the belief in more ambiguous-seeming ones, reports Chris Stokel-Walker for Scientific American. The researchers “conducted five experiments with nearly 5,500 participants in all in which they asked these individuals to read or evaluate news headlines,” writes Stokel-Walker. “Across all the experiments, participants exposed to blatantly false claims were more likely to believe unrelated, more ambiguous falsehoods.”
MIT’s new Climate Policy Center, directed by Prof. Christopher Knittel, will aim to produce “policy-relevant research on shorter timescales, while also pursuing more typical, long-term peer-reviewed work,” reports Andrew Freeman for Axios.
MIT Innovation Fellow Brian Deese speaks with CNBC about how the new class of weight loss drugs will impact American taxes and the federal deficit. “These drugs could touch tens of millions of Americans, that’s the good news,” says Deese. “They have the potential to reduce obesity, address diabetes and reduce the health care costs associated with that. The problem is that the scale and the cost of these drugs is so large, that it could add enormously to the federal budget.”
Prof. Jonathan Gruber, MIT Innovation Fellow Brian Deese and Stanford doctoral student Ryan Cummings write for The New York Times about the health benefits of new weight-loss drugs and the risk they pose to American taxpayers. “The magnitude of potential benefit and potential cost — roughly $15,000 per year per person — posed by these drugs suggests that policymakers may have no alternative but to step in and bring their costs in line with their social benefits,” they write. “If policymakers succeed in doing so, we could build a model for drug price negotiation that enables an extraordinary medical breakthrough to improve both our health and our fiscal position.”