School of Humanities Arts and Social Sciences

Prof. Nick Montfort speaks with GBH All Things Considered host Arun Rath about ChatGPT, its potential impact on the future of academia and how instructors could adapt their courses in light of this new technology.

Researchers from MIT and Harvard have found that “Chinese companies lead the world in exporting face recognition,” potentially enabling other governments to perform more surveillance and harming citizens’ human rights, reports Will Knight for Wired. “The fact that China is exporting to these countries may kind of flip them to become more autocratic, when in fact they could become more democratic,” says Prof. Martin Beraja.

Writing for The Conversation, Prof. Heather Hendershot explores the growth of politically-biased news coverage, comparing Ted Baxter of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” - a fictional news anchor more interested in personal fame than journalistic standards - to today’s pundits. “Ted Baxter thus embodied the ego of the pundit, but without the opinions that often make such a person dangerous,” writes Hendershot. “For all his incompetence, it never occurred to him to air his own political views.”

New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall spotlights a new study by Prof. Charles Stewart III that makes the case that “among Republicans, conspiracism has a potent effect on embracing election denialism, followed by racial resentment.”

MIT researchers have found that “automation is the primary reason the income gap between more and less educated workers has continued to widen,” reports Ellen McGirt for Fortune. “This single one variable…explains 50 to 70% of the changes or variation between group inequality from 1980 to about 2016,” says Prof. Daron Acemoglu

Prof. Kieran Setiya reviews “And Finally: Matters of Life and Death” by Henry Marsh for The New York Times. “Many years ago, Marsh read philosophy at Oxford University, but he left for the more practical world of medicine after a year,” writes Setiya. “He finds himself returning in this book to philosophical questions about consciousness and fear of death, though he does so through narrative, not argument, his skills honed by years of storytelling as a clinician recounting case histories.”

MIT has been named the best university for social sciences degrees in the United States for 2023 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. “All undergraduate students at MIT take classes in the arts and social sciences and many end up taking joint degrees between the sciences and the social sciences,” writes Times Higher Education.

The Economist highlights several studies by MIT researchers on income inequality and wages in the U.S., noting that “Clem Aeppli of Harvard and Nathan Wilmers of MIT found that earnings inequality basically reached a plateau after 2012.” Additionally, Prof. David Autor and his colleagues have found that wages for the bottom half of workers have been growing roughly two percentage points faster than for the upper half of workers.

Collage New Music, Boston’s longest-running contemporary music group, will be performing at MIT’s Killian Hall on March 12, 2023, reports Lloyd Schwartz for WBUR. Schwartz also notes that Professor Emerita Ellen Harris will be introducing the Boston Camerata production of “Dido and Aeneas” on March 18 at Pickman Hall.

Prof. Daron Acemoglu and his colleagues have found that “managers educated at business schools were more likely to favor shareholders over employees,” writes University of London Prof. André Spicer for the Financial Times. The researchers found that “employees working for companies run by a business school-educated manager earned, on average, 6 percent less in the US and 3 percent less in Denmark,” writes Spicer.

Prof. Alan Lightman hosts a new, three-part series titled “Searching, Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science,” reports Jane Levere for Forbes. Lightman “explores timeless and deep questions about man and the universe with ethicists, philosophers, faith leaders and Nobel Prize-winning scientists,” writes Levere.

New research by Prof. David Autor finds that in the U.S. the fast wage growth underway likely reflects a more competitive labor market for workers, writes Martin Sandbu for the Financial Times. “If more workers than before are shifting from worse-paid to better-paid jobs, then wage acceleration is a welcome indicator of an equally welcome reallocation of labor towards more productive activities,” Sandbu writes.

A study by Prof. Amy Finkelstein finds that physicians and their families are less likely to comply with medication guidelines, reports Dennis Thompson for HealthDay. The researchers found that “people tend to adhere to medication guidelines about 54% of the time, while doctors and their families lag about 4 percentage points behind that.”

Financial Times reporter Jonathan Derbyshire spotlights “Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way” by Prof. Kieran Setiya. “But that doesn’t mean either that ‘Life Is Hard’ is a self-help book, and it’s all the better and more interesting for it,” writes Derbyshire. “Setiya warns readers at the outset that they are not going to find in it ‘five tips for overcoming grief’ or ‘how to succeed without even trying.’”

Prof. Daron Acemoglu speaks with Politico reporter Derek Robertson about his new study examining the impacts of automation on the workforce and economy. “This discussion gets framed around ‘Will robots and AI destroy jobs, and lead to a jobless future,’ and I think that's the wrong framing,” says Acemoglu. “Industrial robots may have reduced U.S. employment by half a percent, which is not trivial, but nothing on that scale [of a “jobless future”] has happened — but if you look at the inequality implications, it's been massive.”