Prof. Emeritus Thomas Kochan speaks with Sarah Gonzalez of NPR’s Planet Money about why European workers tend to be allotted more vacation time than workers in the U.S. Kochan notes that “if given the option, workers are historically more interested in seeing their take-home pay increase than they are in getting another day or week of vacation,” particularly when they have to cover the costs of health insurance.
A working paper co-authored by Prof. John Horton and graduate students Emma van Inwegen and Zanele Munyikwa has found that “AI has the potential to level the playing field for non-native English speakers applying for jobs by helping them better present themselves to English-speaking employers,” reports Medora Lee for USA Today. “Between June 8 and July 14, 2021, [Inwegen] studied 480,948 job seekers, who applied for jobs that require English to be spoken but who mostly lived in nations where English is not the native language,” explains Lee. “Of those who used AI, 7.8% were more likely to be hired.”
Prof. David Autor and his colleagues have documented China’s impact on manufacturing jobs in the U.S. after joining the World Trade Organization in 2001, an effect known as the China shock, reports Shawn Donnan for Bloomberg in an article about how manufacturing job losses impacted Rockingham County in North Carolina. “Declining populations of young workers, as well as lower pay, have persisted in Rockingham and other communities hardest hit by this China shock, the researchers found in a 2021 paper,” writes Donnan.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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. 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.”
Prof. Emeritus Thomas Kochan writes for The Hill about the need for a new social contract that reflects the expectations of today’s workforce, including sizable wage increases due to inflation and a voice in the use of AI and generative technology. “Either labor and management negotiate a new social contract that is more responsive to what workers want and need today, or we will experience intensified conflicts that further divide our country,” writes Kochan.
MIT has been ranked among the top employers for women in 2023, according to Forbes and Statista, reports Rachel Rabkin Peachman for Forbes. “The ranking derives primarily from surveys of more than 60,000 workers at companies with at least 1,000 employees,” writes Peachman.
Financial Times reporter Andrew Hill spotlights Prof. Zeynep Ton’s new book “The Case for Good Jobs,” which presents “a tough, evidence-backed approach to improving what is often unhelpfully classed as ‘unskilled’ work.” Hill notes that: “Ton’s recipe has four ingredients: focus and simplify, standardize and empower, cross-train staff and ‘operate with slack’, which allows employees greater autonomy and gives them time to solve problems and come up with new ideas themselves.”
A study by researchers from MIT and Stanford University explored how customer service agents use generative AI chatbots in their response to tech support questions, reports Meghan McCarty for Marketplace. “The most experienced workers see no to even small negative effects of the AI being turned on for them, while the less-experienced and least-productive workers see on average 30 to 35% improvements in productivity,” explains graduate student Lindsey Raymond.
Prof. Yossi Sheffi speaks with Marketplace host Meghan McCarty Carino about how AI has impacted the workplace, highlighting the wide deployment of robots in warehouses. “Instead of people running around the warehouses, the people stand and the robots run around the warehouses,” Sheffi said. “But they bring the work to the people who then put it in boxes, package them.”
In conversation with Matthew Huston at Science, Prof. John Horton discusses the possibility of using chatbots in research instead of humans. As he explains, a change like that would be similar to the transition from in-person to online surveys, “"People were like, ‘How can you run experiments online? Who are these people?’ And now it’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, of course you do that.’”
Researchers from MIT have found that using generative AI chatbots can improve the speed and quality of simple writing tasks, but often lack factual accuracy, reports Richard Nieva for Forbes. “When we first started playing with ChatGPT, it was clear that it was a new breakthrough unlike anything we've seen before,” says graduate student Shakked Noy. “And it was pretty clear that it was going to have some kind of labor market impact.”