School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

Institute Prof. Daron Acemoglu discusses AI and the labor market, the history of technological progress and Turkey with Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar. “I think the skills of a carpenter or a gardener or an electrician or a writer, those are just the greatest achievements of humanity, and I think we should try to elevate those skills and elevate those contributions,” says Acemoglu. “Technology could do that, but that means to use technology not to replace these people, not to automate those tasks, but to increase their productivity.” 

Popular Science reporter Andrew Paul spotlights “Ways of Seeing” a documentary project that aims to create “extended reality” (XR) experiences of significant architectural locales in Afghanistan as part of an effort to preserve the country’s historical sites. Paul notes that the project combines “cutting edge 3D imaging, drone photography, and virtual reality combined with painstakingly detailed hand drawings.”

Prof. Daron Acemoglu speaks with Wired reporters Gideon Lichfield and Lauren Goode about his new book with Prof. Simon Johnson, “Power and Progress.” Acemoglu explains that: “The way I would put it is, don't think of your labor as a cost to be cut. Think of your labor as a human resource to be used better, and AI would be an amazing tool for it. Use AI to allow workers to make better decisions.”

Guardian reporter Will Hutton spotlights “Power and Progress,” a new book by Institute Prof. Daron Acemoglu and Prof. Simon Johnson that makes the case that “the political struggle has consistently aimed to contain excessive inequality of wealth, and act collectively to share prosperity. It is successive waves of transformative technologies above all that bring the productivity gains that create great wealth, only for it to be captured by the incumbent elite.”

Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have found chance encounters among employees of different companies can kickstart innovation, reports Bart Ziegler for The Wall Street Journal. Researchers explained that such chance meetings “may spark a conversation that leads to a transfer of knowledge or a collaboration,” writes Ziegler.

Eleven fellows have been selected for the 2023-2024 Morningside Academy for Design (MIT MAD) program, reports Designboom, which is focused on offering “opportunities for students, faculty, and the general public to explore the intersection of design, technology, and social impact.” The fellowship program is aimed at helping designers have a “real-world impact in fields such as sustainability, architecture, health, and social justice.”

A new working paper by Prof. Christian Wolf and his colleagues explores a “mechanism by which a government could run deficits and never have to pay them,” reports Peter Coy for The New York Times. The researchers found that “‘deficits contribute to their own financing via two channels.’ First, they can accelerate economic growth, which generates more tax revenue. Second, they can cause inflation to rise, which shrinks the effective cost of debt.

Prof. David Autor speaks with Greg Rosalsky of NPR’s Planet Money about the potential benefits and downsides of AI, sharing his hope that with the right policies in place to help prepare workers AI could be harnessed to help “reinstate the middle class.” Says Autor: "Basically, the middle-skilled workers of the future could be people who have foundational skills in healthcare, in the trades, in travel and services. Then, with the help of AI, they could get really good at these jobs.”

Prof. James Poterba, president of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member on the Business Cycle Dating Committee, speaks with NBC Boston reporter Annie Nova about the practice of dating economic downturns. Poterba notes that examining economic fluctuations “helps to design policy going forward. It enables us to look back and say, for example, what are the consequences of interest rate increases?”

Writing for The Los Angeles Times, Institute Prof. Daron Acemoglu and Prof. Simon Johnson make the case that the development of artificial intelligence should be shifted “toward a focus on ‘machine usefulness,’ the idea that computers should primarily enhance human capabilities. But this needs to be combined with an explicit recognition that any resulting productivity gains must be shared with workers, in terms of higher incomes and better working conditions.”

Prof. David Singer speaks with Bloomberg reporter Max Abelson about banking crises. “The recipe for stability is to have well-capitalized, risk-averse banks,” says Singer. “But banks won’t naturally gravitate toward such behavior. They need thorough and steady regulation that doesn’t ease up when the economy is humming.”

Financial Times correspondent Rana Foroohar spotlights Prof. Daron Acemoglu and Prof. Simon Johnson’s new book, “Power and Progress,” which “explores several moments over the last millennium when technology led to the opposite of shared prosperity.” In the book, Acemoglu and Johnson “take a different approach to the productivity gains of technology and how they get distributed compared with most of their peers.”

Prof. Edward Flemming speaks with Boston.com reporter Ross Cristantiello about the origins of the Boston accent. Flemming says the “'softening' and eventual dropping of “R” sounds appears to have spread from the south of England through ports up and down the eastern coast of America, influencing the accents found in cities like Charleston and New York City.”

Prof. Emeritus Marcia Bartusiak speaks with GBH co-hosts Paris Alston and Jeremy Siegel about her four decades of experience as a science communicator covering the fields of astronomy and physics. “That’s the role of a science writer, is to take those, what seemed to be difficult ideas and, through metaphors and analogies, show how it affects your everyday life, or explain them with examples that they would be familiar with from their everyday life,” says Bartusiak.

Prof. Amy Finkelstein speaks with Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics Radio about why insurance markets are broken, how they can be fixed, and her new book, “Risky Business.” Finkelstein explains that “one thing I hadn’t realized ‘til I started working in economics is there’s another type of market frailty that’s really important, that’s the subject of a lot of government policy, but that most people just don’t seem to be as aware of. And that’s the problem of selection. And it’s front and center in insurance markets.”