MIT Sloan School of Management

Boston Globe reporter Kara Baskin spotlights Prof. Zeynep Ton’s work advocating for better treatment and pay for workers. Ton, who originally came to the Boston area to study supply chains, recently published a new book, “The Case for Good Jobs,” and is “on a mission to change how company leaders think, and how they treat their employees,” writes Baskin. “To Ton, the solution is clear: Treat people better, give them more control over their lives, close the income divide. It’s just good business.”

Prof. Danielle Li and graduate student Lindsey Raymond speak with NPR hosts Wailin Wong and Adrian Ma about how generative artificial intelligence could impact the workplace based on their research examining how an AI chatbot affected workers at customer contact centers. “A lot of what customer service is, is about managing people's feelings 'cause people come, they're tired or whatever,” says Li. “And so in some sense there's kind of this sort of human soft skills component that these technologies are able to capture in a way that prior technologies couldn't.”

Neil Thompson, director of the FutureTech research project at MIT CSAIL and a principal investigator MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, speaks with Politico reporter Mohar Chatterjee about generative AI, the pace of computer progress and the need for the U.S. to invest more in developing the future of computing. “We need to make sure we have good secure factories that can produce cutting-edge semiconductors,” says Thompson. “The CHIPS Act covers that. And people are starting to invest in some of these post-CMOS technologies — but it just needs to be much more. These are incredibly important technologies.”

Prof. Daron Acemoglu speaks with VOX Talks host Tim Phillips about his new book written with Prof. Simon Johnson, “Power and Progress.” The book explores “how we can redirect the path of innovation,” Phillips explains.

Prof. Alexey Makarin and his colleagues have found that following the arrival of Facebook, depression, anxiety and diminished academic performance increased across U.S. colleges, reports Jesse Greenspan for Scientific American. “Makarin says much of the harm they documented came from social comparisons,” explains Greenspan.

Bloomberg reporter Adrian Wooldridge spotlights a new book titled “Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity” by Prof. Simon Johnson and Prof. Daron Acemoglu. “The authors’ main worry about AI is not that it will do something unexpected like blowing up the world,” writes Wooldridge. “It is that it will supercharge the current regime of surveillance, labor substitution and emotional manipulation.”

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.” 

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.”

Prof. Stuart Madnick speaks with Wall Street Journal reporter Seán Captain about how AI could make scamming easier and more dangerous. AI “raises the level of skepticism that we must have substantially,” notes Madnick. “Procedures will have to be put in place to validate the authenticity of who you are dealing with.”

Prof. Anna Stansbury and her colleagues have found that economics PhD recipients are more likely to have a parent with a graduate degree, reports Andrew Van Dam for The Washington Post. “This study is one of the first to describe academia’s struggles with economic diversity, but its racial diversity issues have been well documented,” explains Van Dam. “They’re particularly pronounced in economics, which has fewer underrepresented minorities among its PhD graduates (about 6 percent) than any other major field.”

Wired reporter Caitlin Harrington writes that a study by researchers from MIT and Stanford highlights the impact of generative AI tools on workers and raises a “provocative new question: Should the top workers whose chats trained the bot be compensated?”

Researchers from MIT have found that “although women received higher performance ratings than their male colleagues, they received 8.3% lower ratings for potential than men,” reports Caroline Castrillon for Forbes. “Because those ratings strongly predict promotions, female employees were 14% less likely to be promoted than male ones,” writes Castrillon.

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. Simon Johnson and Prof. Yossi Sheffi speak with Boston 25 about the potential impact of AI on the labor market. “We need people to have what’s called soft skills,” says Sheffi. “They need to be able to convince people, manage people, work with people, partner with people.” Johnson notes while there are still fields that are safe bets, but notes that the speed with which [AI] is moving and currently the acceleration is really dramatic.”