More News from IWER

"Do we need more people? Do we need fewer people? We have no idea. Nobody has a clue," wrote Professor Emeritus Paul Osterman in the forthcoming book "Disposable Workers." He added that companies treated workers as expendable and got rid of them when it was convenient. Osterman expects this trend of precarious work to continue during this period of change. "Artificial intelligence introduces a lot of uncertainty among employers who do not know what they need and what they do not need," he said.

A recent MIT FutureTech report on AI risk drew responses from 272 specialists, including professor Jackson Lu, research scientist Peter Slattery, and principal research scientist Neil Thompson. "These findings are a call to arms for those building and governing AI to make sure the worst outcomes do not occur," said Thompson.

A study by associate professor Taha Choukhmane and co-authors found that AI-generated financial advice moves people closer to sound long-term financial behavior, but the benefits are not distributed equally. "Regular people are not writing their prompts the way a finance professor is," said Choukhmane. AI systems tend to produce stronger financial recommendations when users provide richer context about their circumstances, he explained.

Distinguished senior lecturer Robert Pozen wrote: "The National Association of Insurance Commissioners has adopted a process to allow state regulators to challenge individual ratings. It's also developing a due-diligence framework to assess whether private ratings are mapped appropriately to regulatory risk categories. A simpler and more effective solution would be for state insurance regulators to mandate public disclosure of all ratings of private credit, along with explanations on how they were determined."

Professor Jackson Lu and co-authors wrote: "By making negotiation rules visible, reducing reliance on self-advocacy, holding evaluators accountable, and pairing empowerment with protection, [senior leaders] can make negotiation a genuine vehicle for mobility rather than a gatekeeper of privilege."

Professor Simon Johnson and co-author discussed how high inflation and interest rates are eating away at the foundations of the Russian economy and sapping its growth. By hitting its most important sectors, and its essential source of foreign hard cash, new US legislation would pile enormous pressure on the Kremlin just when it is urgently needed.

"The sheer number of platforms turns attention into a central economic resource," said professor Sinan Aral. "This mechanism creates structural pressure toward content capable of generating an immediate reaction. In this scenario, complex materials are more difficult to circulate because they demand time, patience, and sustained concentration. What is relevant for public understanding often loses ground to emotionally effective stimuli."

Research scientist Christian Catalini said: "We should probably not worry about the sci-fi model turning evil and trying to take over our systems, but about the consequences of not foreseeing how high-performance AI systems will interpret human instructions."

In this interview, senior lecturer Paul Cheek discussed the index he created to assess AI adoption across S&P 500 companies, the most important thing executives need to do for AI transformation, and why he says he is "bullish" about software engineers' skills.

A new study by professor Jackson Lu and co-authors suggests that AI may make workers more creative, but there's a catch: Only certain employees are reaping the benefits. "Metacognition — thinking about your thinking — is the missing link between simply using AI and using it well," Lu said of the results. "It allows people to ask better questions, recognize knowledge gaps, and extract real value from AI tools instead of relying on them passively."