MIT Sloan in the News | August 28, 2024
In honor of Labor Day, MIT Sloan in the News is highlighting some of our media coverage on the future of work from over the past year — with insights from faculty and researchers on how AI can make a positive impact on the workplace, creating more good jobs, the business case for DEI, and more. Enjoy!
Highlights
Remote work, AI, and skills-based hiring threaten to put our jobs on the chopping block — but experts say those fears are overblown: Fortune | 12/23/2023 | Anna Stansbury Assistant professor Anna Stansbury said: “If people that code for Google and Facebook were able to live wherever in the U.S. they wanted and work for a year and a half without ever going to the office, it seems very, very likely that a lot of companies would be rethinking this longer-term and outsourcing those kinds of jobs that didn’t used to be outsourced.”
Why younger workers teaching generative AI can be risky: Society for Human Resource Management | 07/23/2024 | Kate Kellogg In this interview about her new working paper, professor Kate Kellogg said: “This paper is really reporting the main effect, which was that it was really striking and surprising to us that junior professionals were not going to be the clear answer here in terms of training. Now our next step is to look at the variation and to see does this vary by type of professional.”
The business case for diversity, equity and inclusion: GBH | 07/5/2024 | Malia Lazu In the crosshairs of the discourse around DEI in the workplace are chief diversity offices, or CDOs. Lecturer Malia Lazu joined a panel discussion on this topic.
The future of fulfilling work is AI-driven: The Atlantic | 06/2/2024 | Andrew McAfee Principal research scientist Andrew McAfee said: “If you force people to interact with AI in a completely standardized way, you’re missing out on some of the amazing upside of this technology. The organizations that are most successful are the ones that set up sandboxes and let experimentation happen.”
How to measure the productivity of remote workers: Inc. | 03/6/2024 | Robert C. Pozen With Slack and other technology in the remote workplace, workers can feel pressured to answer immediately, or else be perceived as slacking off. That pressure can distract them from other work, stymieing productivity. But, if you’ve set those clear priorities, this kind of micromanaging and frequent communication will be redundant, Senior lecturer Robert C. Pozen said, “because you’ve told them: Here’s what you need to accomplish.”
Employer power over H-1B workers could create financial risk: TechTarget | 02/15/2024 | Nemit Shroff A new paper co-authored by professor Nemit Shroff examined what happened when the H-1B visa cap was reduced in 2004. Recommended policy fixes include extending the grace period for visa holders, now at 60 days, before their ability to reside in the U.S. lawfully expires, said Professor Shroff. If visa workers were less fearful of having to leave the country, he said, they would be “less likely to be coerced by their boss into participating in misconduct and more likely to blow the whistle if they observe misconduct.”
In defense of busywork: The Verge | 02/15/2024 | Danielle Li Associate professor Danielle Li, co-author of a paper called “Generative AI at Work,” said she finds busywork soothing in part because it catapults her into a “flow state,” but also because it allows her to keep up the performance of work while resting her mind. Li said she would celebrate AI tools reducing three hours of labor to one hour of labor if she could then use one and a half of the two hours she’d saved to, say, take a walk or browse the internet, and only the remaining thirty minutes for focused work. “Those two extra hours can’t get replaced with genuine mental activity.”
A.I. should be a tool, not a curse, for the future of work: The New York Times | 01/24/2024 | Daron Acemoglu, Zeynep Ton The official launch of the MIT Shaping the Future of Work Initiative included presentations by Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu and professor of the practice Zeynep Ton.
AI might not take your job after all: Marketplace | 01/22/2024 | Neil Thompson An MIT working paper found that it would be cost-effective to use AI in less than a quarter of the work it could technically do. “Sometimes, you just need such a high quality of system that building an AI system with that level of quality can often be very, very expensive,” said research scientist Neil Thompson, director of MIT’s FutureTech research project, which conducted the analysis.
Minimum wages are going up. Low-paid workers probably won’t notice.: WSJ | 12/31/2023 | Nathan Wilmers According to a Wall Street Journal analysis from associate professor Nathan Wilmers that compared state minimum wages to income estimates, through September, the lowest 10% of workers by income in each state earned hourly wages that were on average nearly 50% higher than their state’s minimum wages in 2023.
People can do more with lump sum of money than payments, experiment in Kenya suggests: NPR | 12/5/2023 | Tavneet Suri A U.S.-based charity called GiveDirectly has been providing thousands of villagers in Kenya a universal basic income. Professor Tavneet Suri and co-researchers wanted to see whether those no-strings grants would improve people’s lives. She said the next several years are going to be crucial to study. “We need to see if these effects last. Does it just disappear, or was this enough to keep them going forever?”
US unions winning big gains amid ‘Great Reset’ in worker power: The Guardian | 10/24/2023 | Thomas Kochan Professor Emeritus Thomas Kochan said: “All this reflects a reset in expectations and wage norms for workers and for employers. These successes are a reflection of the workforce’s strong expectations and the workforce’s demands to make up for lost ground due to inflation — and to signal that times have changed. The modest wage increases of the past will no longer be adequate to deal with our situation.”
Opinion Pieces
As boards focus more on cybersecurity, are they missing one of the biggest threats?: The Wall Street Journal | 03/13/2024 | Stuart Madnick, Kerry Pearlson, Jeffrey Proudfoot Executive Director, CAMS, Keri Pearlson and research affiliate Jeffrey Proudfoot wrote: “Virtually all cybersecurity assets and efforts are focused on protecting the organization itself — its employees, managers, executives, business processes, technologies and so on — but directors need to be included in the security plans, too. With the increasing mandate on boards to serve as the strategic cybersecurity guards of their companies, more needs to be done to guard the guards themselves.”
How to create more good jobs: Project Syndicate | 08/2/2024 | Simon Johnson Professor Simon Johnson wrote: “If you want more good jobs, invest in science, facilitate the commercialization of the technology that results from it, and make it easy for people to build companies where the product was invented.”
