School of Humanities Arts and Social Sciences

Profs. Daron Acemoglu and David Autor join Jon Stewart on his podcast, “The Weekly Show” to discuss what the future might look like for American workers and the importance of creating guardrails and policies that help ensure AI can be integrated in way that is positive for workers. “There’s constructive ways to steer.  We don't need to shut it down. We don't need to regulate it to death so it can't move. The U.S. is innovative, and that's great. We have a lot to be proud of, in that we have led this technology. We're building it out quickly. It's valuable,” says Autor. “We need to steer it. Just left to its own…it’s not going to be pro-worker.” 

Fortune reporter Nick Lichtenberg highlights research by MIT economists that finds “automation doesn’t affect all parts of a job equally. The critical variable is whether the tasks being automated are the expert parts of a role or the administrative scaffolding around them.” 

Prof. David Autor speaks with The Guardian reporter Julia Scott about the growing appeal of hands-on jobs for young workers. These jobs “are an area where there’s tremendous specialized knowledge,” says Autor.  “It’s often acquired in the field. And it’s not easily automatable because it requires lots and lots of judgment, combined with a level of dexterity and adaptability in an ever-changing environment. That’s very, very challenging for robotics.” 

Prof. Adam Berinsky speaks with Washington Post reporter Shira Ovide about American’s relationship with AI and social media. “Berinsky said the unfavorable opinions about AI aren’t that bad compared with Americans’ low confidence in many institutions, including big business, Congress and newspapers,” writes Ovide. 

According to the 2026 QS World University Rankings, MIT has been earned a No. 1 global ranking in 12 subject areas, including chemical engineering; chemistry; civil and structural engineering; computer science and information systems; data science and artificial intelligence; electrical and electronic engineering; engineering and technology; linguistics; materials science; mechanical, aeronautical, and manufacturing engineering; mathematics; and physics and astronomy, reports Michael T. Nietzel for Forbes.

Prof. Justin Reich speaks with New York Times reporter Matthew Haag about the integration of educational technology tools, including AI, in schools. “Historically, when we try to guess the best ways of using new technologies, we’re often wrong,” explains Reich. “There are lots of people who are out there who will say, ‘This is what we need to do, this is best practice,’ and they’re making stuff up.”

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.” 

Writing for Foreign Affairs, Prof. Caitlin Talmadge explores the state of the Strait of Hormuz amid the United States’ conflict with Iran. “In short, if Iran effectively mines the strait, all U.S. response options are suboptimal,” writes Talmadge. “The United States should therefore focus aggressively on preventing Iranian mine-laying in the first place and finding an off-ramp from the larger war. If it does not, Washington should expect that ongoing harassment of traffic in the strait will be but one of a number of responses that Iran has long prepared and will now deploy.”

A new working paper by researchers from MIT and other institutions explores the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), reports Ana Swanson for The New York Times. The researchers “found that American workers in communities that were more exposed to competition from Mexican imports saw a significant shortening of their life spans after the trade deal went into effect in 1994,” writes Swanson. 

Boston Globe reporter Kate Tuttle spotlights “We (The People of the United States),” a new poetry book by Prof. Joshua Bennett. “I started to think of it as an ode to invention,” says Bennett. “There are poems in the book about individual people, but there are also poems about the television, the typewriter, the trampoline. I really wanted to celebrate the invention of a people, the invention of a country, the invention of a certain vision of the human genre.”

MIT has launched a new effort aimed at helping high schoolers across the U.S. tackle calculus, reports Juliet Schulman-Hall for MassLive. The new program, called the MIT4America Calculus Project, pairs trained MIT undergraduates and alumni with school districts across the U.S. to tutor high school students from Montana to Texas in calculus. The program “was created last year with an in-person summer calculus camp,” Schulman-Hall notes. “Since then, it has grown to include 14 school districts.” 

A new essay by Profs. Daron Acemoglu, David Autor and Simon Johnson, has offered “a more hopeful vision for the future of human work,” in a world infused with AI, reports Greg Rosalsky for NPR’s Planet Money. The authors “spend much of the essay providing a thought-provoking analysis of how new technologies can affect human jobs in general,” writes Rosalsky. “In short, it's complicated. Yes, often they do kill jobs. Other times they can make jobs less lucrative by, for example, making those jobs easier to do — or ‘de-skilling’ them — which means the supply of workers who can do these jobs goes up and wages for the occupation can go down.” 

Prof. Jonathan Gruber speaks with GBH’s Morning Edition host Mark Herz about the potential impact of rent control in Massachusetts. “Capping the price doesn’t solve the problem,” says Gruber. “It simply allows the existing set of people to have their prices not increase at the expense of other people who might benefit from living in Massachusetts.”

Prof. Daron Acemoglu speaks with WBUR Here & Now host Scott Tong about the impact of AI on the white-collar job market and the economy. “The advances in AI models have been pretty impressive,” says Acemoglu. “But right now, much of this is still in the lab, so to speak, meaning it has not spread to the productive sector of the economy. We are not seeing massive job losses…but of course we should be planning for how these models will be used and what their impact should be.”

Prof. Daron Acemoglu speaks with Fortune reporter Jake Angelo about his work studying the “origins of economic and political decay,” and the need for the U.S. to crack down “on economic inequality and tempering with job destruction.” “If we go down this path of destroying jobs [and] creating more inequality, U.S. democracy is not going to survive,” says Acemoglu.