He MIT initiative shaping the future of work, co-directed by MIT professors Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, and Simon Johnson, celebrated its official launch on January 22. The mission of the new initiative is to analyze the forces that are eroding the quality of employment and labor market opportunities for non-college workers and identify innovative ways to move the economy toward a more equitable trajectory. Here, Acemoglu, Autor and Johnson talk about the origins, goals and plans of their new initiative.
Q: What was the impetus for creating the MIT Shaping the Future of Work initiative?
David Author: The last 40 years have been increasingly difficult for the 65 percent of American workers who do not have a four-year college degree. Globalization, automation, deindustrialization, deunionization, and changes in policies and ideologies have led to fewer jobs, lower wages, and lower quality of employment, resulting in greater inequality and reduced opportunity.
The prevailing economic view has been that this erosion is inevitable: that the best we can do is focus on the supply side, educating workers to meet market demands or perhaps offering some compensatory transfers to those who have lost employment opportunities. employment.
This fatalism is based on a paradigm that holds that the factors that shape labor demand, such as technological change, are immutable: workers must adapt to these forces or be left behind. This assumption is false. The direction of technology is something we choose, and the institutions that shape how these forces develop (e.g., minimum wage laws, regulations, collective bargaining, public investments, social norms) are also endogenous.
To challenge a dominant narrative, it is not enough to simply say that it is wrong; To truly change a paradigm we must lead by showing a viable alternative path. We must answer what kind of work we want and how we can formulate policies and shape the technology that builds that future.
Q: What are your goals for the initiative?
Daron Acemoglu: The ambition of the initiative is not modest. Simon, David and I hope to advance new empirical work to interpret what has happened in the recent past and understand how different types of technologies might be impacting prosperity and inequality. We want to contribute to the emergence of a coherent framework that can inform us about how institutions and social forces shape the trajectory of technology, and that helps us identify, empirically and conceptually, the inefficiencies and drifts of technology. And on this basis, we hope to contribute to policy debates where policies, institutions and norms are part of what shapes the future of technology in a more beneficial direction. Last but not least, our mission is not only to do our own research, but to help build an ecosystem where other researchers, especially younger ones, are inspired to explore these topics.
Q: What are your next steps?
Simon Johnson: David, Daron and I plan for this initiative to go beyond producing in-depth and innovative research: our goal is to identify innovative pro-worker ideas that policymakers, the private sector and civil society can use. We will continue to put research into practice by regularly convening students, academics, policymakers and professionals who are shaping the future of work, to include strengthening and diversifying the pipeline of emerging scholars producing policy-relevant research around to our central themes.
We will also produce a range of resources to bring our work to wider audiences. Last fall, David, Daron, and I wrote the initiative's inaugural policy memo, titled “ai/” target=”_blank”>Can we have ai in favor of workers?? “Choose a path of machines at the service of minds.” Our thesis is that rather than focusing on replacing workers by automating work tasks as quickly as possible, the best way forward is to focus on developing ai tools that augment workers and enable workers less. educated or less skilled perform more expert tasks. in addition to creating work, in the form of new productive tasks, for workers of all levels of skills and education.
As we move forward, we will also seek opportunities to collaborate globally with a wide range of academics working on related topics.