Q: What was the impetus for founding the MIT Shaping the Future of Work Initiative?
David Author: The last 40 years have turn into increasingly difficult for the 65 percent of U.S. employees who wouldn’t have a four-year college degree. Globalization, automation, deindustrialization, deunionization, and changes in policy and beliefs have led to fewer jobs, declining wages, and poorer job quality, resulting in greater inequality and shrinking opportunities.
The prevailing economic opinion has been that this erosion is inevitable – that the perfect we are able to do is to deal with the availability side, training employees to satisfy market demands, or perhaps providing some compensatory transfers for many who do who’ve lost employment opportunities.
Underlying this fatalism is a paradigm that holds that the aspects that determine the demand for labor, equivalent to technological change, are immutable: employees must adapt to those forces or they will likely be left behind. This assumption is improper. The direction of technology is something we elect, and the institutions that determine how these forces operate (e.g., minimum wage laws, regulations, collective bargaining, public investment, social norms) are also endogenous.
To challenge a dominant narrative, it shouldn’t be enough to easily say it’s improper – to actually change a paradigm, we must cleared the path by showing a viable alternative path. We have to answer what type of work we would like and the way we are able to develop policies and design technologies that shape that future.
Q: What are your goals for the initiative?
Daron Acemoglu: The initiative's ambition shouldn’t be modest. Simon, David and I hope to make progress on latest empirical work to interpret recent events and understand how several types of technologies might affect wealth and inequality. We need to contribute to the emergence of a coherent framework that may inform us about how institutions and social forces shape the event of technology and that helps us empirically and conceptually discover the inefficiencies and misdirections of technology. And on this basis, we hope to contribute to policy discussions through which policies, institutions and norms are a part of what shapes the long run of technology in a more helpful direction. Last but not least, our mission shouldn’t be only to conduct our own research, but to assist construct an ecosystem where other, especially younger, researchers are inspired to explore these topics.
Q: What are your next steps?
Simon Johnson: David, Daron and I plan for this initiative to transcend producing insightful and groundbreaking research – our goal is to discover modern worker-friendly ideas that might be utilized by policymakers, the private sector and civil society. We will proceed to place research into practice by repeatedly bringing together students, researchers, policymakers and practitioners who’re shaping the long run of labor. This also includes strengthening and diversifying the pipeline of young scientists who produce policy-relevant research on our core topics.
We will even be making a series of resources to make our work available to a wider audience. Last fall, David, Daron and I drafted the initiative's first policy memo, “Can we now have worker-friendly AI?? Choosing the trail of machines within the service of minds.” Our thesis is that the perfect path forward is to deal with developing workforce-enhancing AI tools that enable less educated or less expert employees to perform more demanding tasks, somewhat than specializing in replacing employees by automating work tasks as quickly as possible. and the creation of jobs in the shape of recent productive tasks for employees of all skill and academic levels.
As we move forward, we will even search for opportunities to collaborate globally with a broad range of scientists working on related topics.
