More News from IWER

Professor Emeritus Paul Osterman wrote: "Companies are increasingly stripping workers of employee status, along with the benefits and protections that a job has traditionally offered. And in doing so, they're creating a disposable workforce. Without sustained pressure, disposability will become the default way America works, and the costs will keep piling up. We need to lift our eyes from an obsession with AI, recognize this pattern – and act."

In this broadcast interview, Professor Eric So said: "Many people refer to this era as something of a technological shift or adoption, and to me those words are too orderly, too gentle. Much of what we're seeing in this era of AI is a new wave of technology hitting everywhere all at once. While it's changing so much of what we can do, it's also changing who we are as thinkers. So, the title of my new book, 'The Collision,' is really about this high-impact moment that is reshaping the nature of who we are."

Professor Michael A. Cusumano said the PTC acquisition isn't about any real or imagined shortcomings of Boston. It's about tough competition in the enterprise software business. "Software companies tend to get acquired all the time," said Cusumano. "I don't think it's anything specific to Massachusetts. There's been an enormous consolidation of independent software companies going back to at least the year 2000."

In this broadcast episode, Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu said: "What we are living through with AI is unprecedented. The first phase of the Industrial Revolution lasted for 80 years. Today, it's taking place in one or two years. I am very, very cautious in saying we should say no to technology. Absolutely not. But in every technological revolution there is pushback, and that pushback takes many different forms." (Interview starts at 12:35)

Professor Yasheng Huang said: "About 35 percent of the Chinese population still lives in rural areas, and if you look at the Chinese household registration system, that proportion reaches 60 percent. We admire high-speed rail lines, but we ignore the rural homes that were demolished to make way for them. Even progressives in the United States — who are generally sensitive to the plight of the most disadvantaged — shrug their shoulders. They, too, remain fixated on the 800 million Chinese who have supposedly escaped poverty. But then we should ask ourselves: who plunged them into poverty in the first place?"

Professor Eric von Hippel has spent decades studying what he calls user innovation: products and solutions developed by the people or organizations that need them, rather than by companies trying to sell to them. One reason users can be unusually good at identifying solutions is what von Hippel calls "sticky information." Information about what a customer truly needs can be costly or difficult to transfer because so much of it lives within the customer's specific circumstances and experience.

One barrier to further nuclear development in New England is that the small modular reactors championed by innovators are still far from being grid-ready, said senior lecturer John Parsons. "It's wonderful that we have these startup companies," said Parsons, referring to multiple companies angling to begin producing small modular nuclear reactors. Those companies are "fantastic, good for the economy, good for the vibrancy of our society,” he said. But, he added, "it's not going to put any electrons on the grid tomorrow."

A working paper by professor Kate Kellogg and co-authors, based on a two-year field study of an academic medical center and a corporate law firm, found that building organization-wide generative AI tools created substantial work beyond employees' day-to-day jobs. That work included trial-and-error experimentation, reviewing and refining outputs with colleagues across departments, and continually adapting solutions as AI models evolved.

In their retirement policy proposal, associate professor Taha Choukhmane, research affiliate Lawrence D. W. Schmidt, and co-authors argue that the existing safe harbor formulas are poorly designed: they feature high match rates applied over narrow contribution ranges, which heavily subsidize saving that would have occurred anyway while failing to extend incentives to a broader set of workers.

In an interview with Bloomberg Surveillance, professor of the practice Gary Gensler said that there are safety issues, pointing to when OpenAI models breached the technology firm Hugging Face earlier this year. He noted concerns around AI's capabilities and said that while it is possible to put up safeguards, competition with China presents a "big, consequential wrinkle."