TechCrunch reporter Ron Miller highlights MIT’s role as a driving force behind the Greater Boston area’s success as a hub for startups. Emily Knight, president of The Engine Accelerator, notes that universities are breeding grounds for new ideas. “There is a lot of research and a lot of infant innovation being translated into companies coming out of these [Greater Boston area] universities,” Knight explains.
The Sloan School of Management hosted the “Creating Opportunities for Second Chance Hiring” conference to explore ways to “reduce barriers and increase opportunities for job seekers with a criminal history,” reports Paul Singer for GBH.
Senior lecturer Renée Richardson Gosline speaks with Boston Globe reporter Maddie Khaw about new marketing strategies and how they are being used to promote the latest water bottle trends. “If you can get the right influencer to talk about your stuff, you’ve got more targeted communications,” says Gosline. “What people buy has started to replace a sense of social connection and identity that is missing for many people.”
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.
A new report by researchers from MIT and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has uncovered “how AI-based machine learning and predictive analytics are super-powering key performance indictors (KPIs),” reports Sheryl Estrada for Fortune. “I definitely see marketing, manufacturing, supply chain, and financial folks using these value-added formats to upgrade their existing KPIs and imagine new ones,” says visiting scholar Michael Schrage.
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.”
Prof. David Autor and Prof. Daron Acemoglu speak with New York Times columnist Peter Coy about the impact of AI on the workforce. Acemoglu and Autor are “optimistic about a continuing role for people in the labor market,” writes Coy. “An upper bound of the fraction of jobs that would be affected by A.I. and computer vision technologies within the next 10 years is less than 10 percent,” says Acemoglu.
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.”
Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Prof. Stuart Madnick explains the growing risk of cybersecurity attacks and how to address them. “In many cases, companies fall victim to these attacks because they aren’t aware of the risks that they are taking, such as not confirming the quality of a vendor’s security or monitoring whether their outgoing data traffic is being transferred to improper destinations,” writes Madnick. “Organizations can, and must, do these things better to stop the continued rise in data breaches.”
Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Keri Pearlson, executive director of Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan, and Jeffrey Proudfoot, a research affiliate with Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan, make the case that while board members are increasingly being tasked with a company’s cybersecurity strategy, they are often not prepared to deal with attacks. “With the increasing mandate on boards to serve as the strategic cybersecurity guards of their companies, more needs to be done to guard the guards themselves,” they write.
Prof. Thomas Malone speaks with Poets & Quants for Executives reporter Alison Damast about the executive education course he teaches with Prof. Daniela Rus that aims to provide senior-level managers with a better sense of how AI works. “We are certainly not trying to teach people to understand the details of how to write AI programs, though some of those in the course may know that already,” Malone says. “What we are trying to do is give them a sense of when it is easy and when it is hard to use AI technology at various times for different kinds of business applications.”
Prof. Edward Roberts, one of the area’s “most influential pioneers in entrepreneurship” known for his work “encouraging startups and increasing MIT’s role in the tech industry ecosystem,” has died at 88, reports Aaron Pressman for The Boston Globe. “There’s this narrative that you’re born to be an entrepreneur, and he did this research and debunked that,” explains Prof. Bill Aulet. “It’s impossible to go into entrepreneurship, especially in Boston, but even globally, without finding his influences.”
In an article co-authored for The Economist, Senior Lecturer Donald Sull explores the impact of artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs) on corporate company culture. “Leaders who do adopt AI for cultural insights can use these to make their employees happier, lower the odds of reputational disasters and, ultimately, boost their profits,” writes Sull. “Measurement is not the only piece of the ‘successful culture’ puzzle, but it is a crucial one. Culture has always been an enigma at the heart of organizational performance: undoubtedly important, but inscrutable. With AI, meaningful progress can be made in deciphering it.”
Writing for Financial Times, economist Ann Harrison spotlights research by Prof. Daron Acemoglu, Pascual Restrepo PhD '16 and Prof. David Autor, that explores the impact of automation on jobs in the United States. Acemoglu and Restrepo have “calculated that each additional robot in the US eliminates 3.3 workers” and that “most of the increase in inequality is due to workers who perform routine tasks being hit by automation,” writes Harrison.