As part of the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future's series of research briefs, Professor Thomas Malone, Professor Daniela Rus, and Robert Laubacher collaborated on "Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work," a brief that provides a comprehensive overview of AI today and what lies at the AI frontier. The authors delve into the question of how work will change with AI and provide policy prescriptions that speak to different parts of society. Thomas Malone is director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management in the MIT Sloan School of Management. Daniela Rus is director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and a member of the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future. Robert Laubacher is associate director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.

For a worker losing his or her job to automation, knowing that an AI programming job is being created elsewhere is of little solace. "Instead, we believe that--like all previous labor-saving technologies--AI will enable new industries to emerge, creating more new jobs than are lost to the technology," the report's authors, led by Thomas Malone, director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, conclude. "Though these technologies will eliminate some jobs, they will create many others," the report's team of authors, led by BCG's Rainer Strack. "For example, eliminating 10 million jobs and creating 10 million new jobs would appear to have negligible impact. Computers tend to perform well in tasks that humans find difficult or time-consuming to do, "but they tend to work less effectively in tasks that humans find easy to do," the report notes. For a worker losing his or her job to automation, knowing that an AI programming job is being created elsewhere is of little solace. "Instead, we believe that--like all previous labor-saving technologies--AI will enable new industries to emerge, creating more new jobs than are lost to the technology," the report's authors, led by Thomas Malone, director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, conclude. "Though these technologies will eliminate some jobs, they will create many others," the report's team of authors, led by BCG's Rainer Strack. "For example, eliminating 10 million jobs and creating 10 million new jobs would appear to have negligible impact.

Forbes has been publishing hundreds of articles a day for more than five years. As a Data Scientist, when I hear about that volume of data, the first thing that jumps to mind is: what can we learn from it? Are there best practices we can glean? We started by looking at what colleagues are doing with their own systems. We really enjoyed reading about BuzzFeed's in-house headline A/B testing system, about the New York Times' clever image cropping application, and also about the Washington Posts' feature-rich CMS-for-hire Arc Publishing, among others.