In his latest book, “Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment,” Prof. Emeritus Paul Osterman finds that 35% of the U.S. workforce is made up of disposable workers hired with the “implicit understanding that they won’t be around for long,” writes Fortune’s Nick Lichtenberg. Employers “do not invest in the great bulk of their workforce” in the way that they used to, says Osterman.
Prof. Sherry Turkle speaks to Scientific American’s Brianne Kane about her forthcoming book, “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines.” “Social media got us into the attention economy, but chatbots are more toxic because they’re coming after the attachment economy,” says Turkle. “They’re coming after who you think you love, who you think you can count on, what you think empathy is.”
Prof. Sherry Turkle’s latest book “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines,” is highlighted as one of the best new science books of September 2026 by New Scientist’s Liz Else. In her new book, Turkle explores how machines “are producing a generation more alienated, depressed and lonely than ever – and less equipped to reverse course, as machine relationships offer no practice for getting along with people,” writes Else.
For The Next Big Idea Club, Prof. Paul Osterman outlines the pillars of his new book, “Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment.” “The rise of disposable work is allowing companies to gain flexibility and cut costs while shedding responsibility for their workers,” writes Osterman. “We need guardrails to keep that flexibility from coming at the expense of workers and the public.”
Prof. Paul Osterman speaks to Fortune’s Nick Lichtenberg about how his new book “Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment” explores how a perceived lack of ambition among Gen Z reflects the decreased amount of job security and opportunity available to young workers. “No one has job security anymore, but these folks [disposable workers] are hired with that expectation and are not going to be around for long,” says Osterman.
Sloan Senior Lecturer Paul Cheek’s new book, “No One Works Here” is outlined by Forbes’ Joe McKendrick. “The companies that are most likely to fall behind their peers are the ones that insist on keeping a human in the loop for decisions that a machine could have made yesterday,” Cheek writes in his book.
In an interview with Fortune reporter Nick Lichtenberg, Prof. Daron Acemoglu discusses AI’s economic impact and his book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy. Acemoglu estimates AI will deliver roughly 0.55% in total factor productivity gains. “It’s not that you cannot get big productivity gains from automation. It is that it’s not as easy as sometimes it’s presumed,” says Acemoglu.
Prof. Eric So joins CBS News Tech Watch to discuss a new Pew Research Center study that reveals 40% of U.S. adults perceive AI’s future impact to be negative, as well as his upcoming book, The Collision: What AI Does to Us. “The growth of AI is simply overwhelming for so many people in terms of the pace of progress. But also, a reflection of the fact that for so much of human history, human level intelligence was our most scarce resource, our most defensible advantage,” says So. “It was why we were paid the salaries that we are. And now AI is increasingly commoditizing that. It’s being mass produced in a way that really causes us to question what’s going on to make us valuable in the future.”
Writing for Bloomberg, Prof. Simon Johnson and Prof. Elisabeth Reynolds describe how the U.S. can maintain its technological leadership by investing in research focused on critical minerals, semiconductors, biotechnology, quantum computing, drones and advanced manufacturing. “Invention is important, but technological leadership in the 21st century will go to the country that adopts these new ideas rapidly and applies them in clever ways,” Johnson and Reynolds write. “And that will require the U.S. to build vibrant innovation and industrial ecosystems that adopt and diffuse new technologies, including AI.”
Prof. Alan Lightman details how his childhood fascinations with science experiments and writing helped shape his self-confidence, humanity, and connection to the physical world in an essay for Scientific American’s special section, “The Young American Scientists.” Lightman writes: “Science has given us automobiles, antibiotics, computers. The humanities have given us values and guidance on how to live our lives. Now more than ever, when much of the world, including the U.S., has lost its moral compass, leading to a dog-eat-dog mentality, we need science combined with literature, philosophy, history and art.”
Profs. Elisabeth Reynolds and Simon Johnson joined Tom Keene and Paul Sweeney on Bloomberg Surveillance to discuss their new book, "Priority Technologies: Ensuring U.S. Security and Shared Prosperity," which highlights six key areas where advances in technology can drive the U.S. economy and support national security. “Quantum is the next frontier and opens up billions of dollars of opportunity,” says Reynolds. “Not just for defense and encryption issues, but also across all sorts of applications in financial services and biopharma.”
Prof. Kate Brown speaks with Zoe Matthews of GBH about growing interest in urban gardening. Matthews highlights Brown’s course about cooperative agriculture at MIT, during which “her students produced an accessible how-to guide on starting an urban farm.”
Prof. Kate Brown, author of “Tiny Gardens Everywhere,” speaks with Forbes reporter Alan Ohnsman of Forbes about the benefits of home gardens. Brown notes that people can “put in some healthy soils that are rich with compost, which feeds microbes and worms and black soldier flies, all these creatures that are in the soil so the soil is alive. Then you put in plants, trees, berry bushes, lettuces, greens, whatever. And when it rains, those healthy soils soak up a lot more water… [which is] great for flooding. They sequester a lot of carbon, more than any of our aesthetic alternatives. And of course, they can feed people.”
Writing for The Boston Globe, Prof. Kate Brown and David Greenwood-Sanchez of the University of Iowa explore the growing popularity of transforming residential yards into home gardens. They emphasize: “With food prices up 27 percent since 2020, it is a good time for Massachusetts legislators to consider protecting gardeners from vegetation restrictions so that they can grow plants that, in contrast to turf grass, nurture birds, bees, and the occasional rabbit — and their own families and neighbors.”
New York Times reporter Holly Bass spotlights Prof. Joshua Bennett’s newest works, “We (The People of the United States)” and “The People Can Fly.” Bennett’s “texts remind us there is power in the collective body of a people and their culture,” writes Bass. “There is power in pressing on in the face of obstacles and opposition.”