More News from IWER

"I will expect some impact on the legal profession's labor market, but not major," said assistant professor Mert Demirer. "AI is going to be very useful in terms of information discovery and summary," he said, but for complex legal tasks, "the law's low risk tolerance, plus the current capabilities of AI, are going to make that case less automatable at this point."

Nursing homes and residential care facilities are projected to see a 13 percent jump in employment, while outpatient health care is expected to climb about 10 percent. "Baby boomers and retirements are going to increase demand, and a lot of folks are going to need longer-term health care," said Professor Emeritus Paul Osterman. "The demographics are fixed."

In this podcast episode, professor Alex "Sandy" Pentland discusses his new book "Shared Wisdom: Cultural Evolution in the Age of AI."

Professor Retsef Levi said: "I think we've adopted an extremely medicalized view of health. Too many public-health policies assume that a small group at the top should make decisions for everyone and enforce them instead of putting the individual at the center and empowering people, with the support of doctors and others, to take ownership of their health."

Professor Andrew W. Lo, senior lecturer Egor Matveyev, and co-author wrote: "In our paper, we compile the first comprehensive dataset covering the full universe of U.S. nonprofit endowments. Using IRS Form 990 filings from 2008 to 2020, we study nearly 375,000 nonprofit organizations, including about 40,000 that maintain endowment assets. We combine detailed investment disclosures on Schedule D with governance, compensation, and financial information on the main form to examine how endowment strategy and performance relate to organizational structures and oversight practices."

Those at the top of the organization, senior lecturer George Westerman said, are concerned about the costs associated with AI. At the bottom, people are just wondering if they'll lose their job and how they'll adapt. He described it as decision-making inertia at the top of the organization versus adoption inertia farther down. The challenge is moving both along and bridging the gap. "Helping to create the case for change and helping people feel that they can be part of that change. That's becoming even more critical this time around," he said.

In a recent panel discussion, Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu said AI could take "very different directions, and which direction we choose is going to have great consequences in terms of its labor market impact." He called for "a different future" with "pro-worker AI."

In this interview with principal research scientist Florian Berg he said: "It is true that a lot of companies have withdrawn from net zero alliances. Some of the companies that have withdrawn from those initiatives might not have been very serious about them in the first place. Going beyond that, there is an increasing number of companies disclosing how much CO2 they emit or offering other ESG data. Broadly speaking, four years ago, over 6,000 large companies disclosed CO2 emissions — now, it's 24,000."

AI offers extraordinary value when geared toward solving real-world problems. In accounting, the technology takes care of the "washing" of data processing, as assistant professor Chloe Xie pointed out, freeing up professionals to focus on analysis and strategy.

A recent study co-authored by professors Pierre Azoulay and Danielle Li looked at drugs that were developed through NIH-funded research and approved by the Food and Drug Administration since 2000. More than half those drugs would probably not have been developed if the NIH was operating with a 40% smaller budget. "We can't say, 'But for that grant, that specific drug would not have come into existence,'" said Azoulay. But fewer drugs overall would have made it to market, he said.