MIT’s Shaping the Future of Work Initiative officially launched on January 22. Co-directed by MIT Professors Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, and Simon Johnson, the initiative seeks to examine the factors negatively impacting job quality and employment opportunities for workers without a completed four-year college education. The goal is to propose novel solutions that set the economy on a course towards an equitable distribution of opportunities and resources.
Over the last forty years, this group, which constitutes 65% of the US workforce, has experienced hardships arising from globalization, automation, deindustrialization, de-unionization, and changes in policy and ideology. These changes have yielded fewer jobs, diminishing wages, deteriorating job quality, expanding inequality, and dwindling opportunities. The devastating impact of these disruptive forces was wrongly viewed as inevitable, with the best contingency plan being to realign education and job training to meet market demands or make compensations to those who lost job opportunities.
The initiative’s objective is multifaceted. They aim to conduct in-depth research to understand recent history and the current disruptive impact of technology on prosperity and inequality. Further, they wish to develop a coherent framework for understanding how institutions and societal forces shape the trajectory of technology. This will bring to light the inefficiencies and misguided applications of technology, information that is crucial to framing policy discussions.
Their goal is not just to conduct this research but to foster an environment where budding researchers are encouraged to explore these issues. Policy, institutions, and norms play a pivotal role in molding the future of technology constructively, a factor that will be made explicit by the initiative.
The initiative will transcend traditional academic confines, delving into the development of innovative pro-worker strategies that can be adopted by policymakers, private sector, and civil society. By regularly assembling a diverse group of students, scholars, policymakers, and practitioners, they aim to fortify the pipeline of emerging scholarship to shape future work dynamics.
In the past, co-directors Acemoglu, Autor, and Johnson have penned the initiative’s inaugural policy memo entitled “Can we Have Pro-Worker AI? Choosing a path of machines in service of minds.” The memo proposes developing AI tools that augment the capabilities of less-skilled or less-educated workers. By focusing on enabling these workers to take on more complicated tasks and creating new productive work across all levels of skill and education, a win-win situation could be created.
Going forth, the initiative will continue evolving and incorporating feedback from a global network of scholars addressing similar challenges. This project will provide a fresh viewpoint countering the prevailing belief that market forces are immutable, and it will aim to influence the direction of technology—shaping an equitable future of work.
