Prof. David Autor speaks with Delphine Strauss of the Financial Times about the risks AI poses to jobs and job quality, but also the technology’s potential to help rebuild middle-class jobs. “The good case for AI is where it enables people with foundational expertise or judgment to do more expert work with less expertise,” says Autor. He adds, “My hope is that we can use AI to reinstate the value of skills held by people without as high a degree of formal education.”
MIT Innovation Fellow Brian Deese speaks with CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin about the state of the U.S. economy and the impact of “Bidenomics,” President Joe Biden’s economic philosophy.
Prof. Daron Acemoglu speaks with Boston Globe reporters Alex Kantrowitz and Douglas Gorman about how to address the advance of AI in the workplace. “We know from many areas that have rapidly automated that they don’t deliver the types of returns that they promised,” says Acemoglu. “Humans are underrated.”
MIT researchers have developed a new satellite observation technique that can gauge how fast rivers flowed on Mars billions of years ago and how fast they currently flow on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, reports Talia Lissauer for The Boston Globe. “We can use these other worlds to help us understand what keeps planetary climate stable, or in some cases, what allows planetary climate to change really drastically over time like on Mars,” says Prof. Taylor Perron.
Prof. Kristin Forbes speaks with New York Times reporter Jeanna Smialek about the future of interest rates in the United States. “Now, the economy has learned to function with higher interest rates,” says Forbes. “It gives me hope that we’re coming back to a more normal equilibrium.”
Prof. Simon Johnson speaks with Reuters reporter Mark John about the impact of AI on the economy. “AI has got a lot of potential – but potential to go either way,” says Johnson. “We are at a fork in the road.”
Researchers at MIT and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have published a paper showcasing the development of OncoNPC, an artificial intelligence model that can predict where a patient’s cancer came from in their body, reports Tony Ho Tran for The Daily Beast. This information “can help determine more effective treatment decisions for patients and caregivers,” writes Tran.
Prof. Carlo Ratti writes for Financial Times about how new AI algorithms can impact the property market. “To train a real estate bot, our lab at MIT used pictures of 20,000 houses around Boston, as well as data that measured how their prices changed over time,” write Ratti. “When other variables were added — such as structural information and neighbourhood amenities — our algorithm was able to make very accurate predictions of how prices would change over time.”
Forbes reporter John C. Goodman spotlights “We’ve Got You Covered,” a new book co-authored by Prof. Amy Finkelstein and Stanford economist Liran Einav, which explores the idea of offering universal health insurance coverage with no increase in government spending. “An important argument made by Finkelstein and Einav is that Americans are paying about twice as much as we really need to pay for medically necessary health care,” writes Goodman. “So, if we gave the government’s share to people directly, they would be able to buy essential coverage with that money alone."
Studies by researchers at MIT have found “that shifting to electric vehicles delivers a 30% to 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions over combustion vehicles,” reports Tom Krisher for Associated Press. According to Prof. Jessika Trancik, “electric vehicles are cleaner over their lifetimes, even after taking into account the pollution caused by the mining of metals for batteries,” writes Krisher.
In a new working paper, researchers at MIT and UCLA examined a group of newly hired data entry workers in India and found that “workers randomly assigned to work from home full-time are 18% less productive than those in the office,” reports Jo Constantz for Bloomberg. As Constantz notes, “The new research underscores the challenges inherent in productivity research. Since the workers in the trial were newly hired, their outcomes may differ from employees who switch to fully remote only after first spending significant time on-site.”
Prof. Jon Gruber speaks with NPR hosts Jim Braude and Margery Eagan about the idea of a ‘soft landing’ for the U.S. economy. “All economies are cyclical,” says Gruber. “They go through good times and bad times. And we define good times and bad times based on two variables: inflation and unemployment.”
Prof. Manish Raghavan speaks with The Washington Post reporter Danielle Abril about the risk of AI bias in employers’ recruitment behavior. “For example, AI could appear to be biased in matching mostly Harvard graduates to some jobs when those graduates may just have a higher likelihood to match certain requirements,” explains Abril. “Humans already struggle with implicit biases, often favoring people like themselves, and that could get replicated through AI.”
An analysis by the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative and Climate Interactive has found that planting a trillion trees would only prevent 0.27 degrees of warming by 2100, reports Maxine Joselow for The Washington Post. “Trees are great. I personally love to be out in the forests as much as I possibly can,” says Prof. John Sterman. “But the reality is very simple: You can plant a trillion trees, and even if they all survived, which wouldn’t happen, it just wouldn’t make that much difference to the climate.”
Professor Alex Pentland and Alex Lipton, a Connection Science Fellow at MIT, write for Scientific American about how social media can impact financial systems. “Before Twitter and Facebook, a spooked investor or customer would have to call, personally visit or even e-mail and text colleagues to urge them to withdraw funds from a troubled bank,” explain Pentland and Lipton. “Nowadays sophisticated clients can act as soon as they read a Tweet. Social media alerts everyone all at once, and a few clicks on a computer screen can wipe an account clean.”