MIT Sloan Alumni Online: Matt Beane, SM ’14, PhD ’17

In the age of artificial and machine intelligence, Jackie Selby, EMBA ’21, hosts a conversation with Matt Beane, SM ’14, PhD ’17, on the future of work and human interaction with machines, including highlights from Beane’s recent book, The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in the Age of Intelligent Machines.

Matt Beane does field research on work involving robots and AI to uncover systematic positive exceptions that we can use across the broader world of work. His award-winning research has been published in top management journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly and Harvard Business Review, and he has spoken on the TED stage. He also took a two-year hiatus from his PhD at MIT’s Sloan School of Management to help found and fund Humatics, a full-stack IoT startup. In 2012 he was selected as a Human-Robot Interaction Pioneer, and in 2021 was named to the Thinkers50 Radar list. Beane is an assistant professor in the Technology Management department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a Digital Fellow with Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab and MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. When he’s not studying intelligent technologies and learning, he enjoys playing guitar; his morning coffee ritual with his wife, Kristen; and reading science fiction—a lot of science fiction. He lives in Santa Barbara, California.