GovAI Webinar - The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines

In the spring of 2018, MIT President L. Rafael Reif commissioned the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future. He tasked them with understanding the relationships between emerging technologies and work, to help shape public discourse around realistic expectations of technology, and to explore strategies to enable a future of shared prosperity.

In this webinar David Autor, co-chair of the Task Force will discuss their latest report: The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines. The report documents that the labor market impacts of technologies like AI and robotics are taking years to unfold, however, we have no time to spare in preparing for them.

If those technologies deploy into the labor institutions of today, which were designed for the last century, we will see similar effects to recent decades: downward pressure on wages, skills, and benefits, and an increasingly bifurcated labor market. This report, and the MIT Work of the Future Task Force, suggest a better alternative: building a future for work that harvests the dividends of rapidly advancing automation and ever-more powerful computers to deliver opportunity and economic security for workers. To channel the rising productivity stemming from technological innovations into broadly shared gains, we must foster institutional innovations that complement technological change.

David Autor is Ford Professor of Economics and associate department head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Economics. He is also Faculty Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Research Affiliate of the Abdul Jameel Latin Poverty Action Lab, Co-director of the MIT School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative, Director of the NBER Disability Research Center and former editor in chief of the Journal of Economic Perspectives. He is an elected officer of the American Economic Association and the Society of Labor Economists and a fellow of the Econometric Society.

Katya Klinova directs the strategy and execution of the AI, Labor, and the Economy Research Programs at the Partnership on AI, focusing on studying the mechanisms for steering AI progress towards greater equality of opportunity and improving the working conditions along the AI supply chain. In this role, she oversees multiple programs including the AI and Shared Prosperity Initiative.

Ioana Marinescu is an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy & Practice, and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She studies the labor market to craft policies that can enhance employment, productivity, and economic security. Her research expertise includes wage determination and monopsony power, antitrust law for the labor market, the universal basic income, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, and employment contracts.