Faculty
Thomas W. Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern (1959) Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. At MIT, he is also a Professor of Information Technology and a Professor of Work and Organizational Studies. Previously, he was the founder and director of the MIT Center for Coordination Science and one of the two founding codirectors of the MIT Initiative on Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century. Malone teaches classes on organizational design, information technology, and leadership, and his research focuses on how new organizations can be designed to take advantage of the possibilities provided by information technology.
Malone predicted in an article published in 1987 many of the major developments in electronic business over the following 25 years, including electronic buying and selling for many kinds of products. In 2004, Malone summarized two decades of his research in his critically acclaimed book, The Future of Work. His newest book, Superminds, appeared in May 2018. Malone has also published over 100 articles, research papers, and book chapters. He is the coeditor of four books.
Malone has been a cofounder of four software companies and has consulted and served as a board member for a number of other organizations. He is also an inventor with 11 patents.
His background includes work as a research scientist at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a PhD from Stanford University, an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich, and degrees in applied mathematics, engineering, and psychology.
Featured Publication
Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together.Malone, Thomas W. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2018.
Vaccaro, Michelle, Abdullah Almaatouq, and Thomas Malone. Nature Human Behaviour Vol. 8, No. 12 (2024): 2293-2303.
Heyman, Jennifer L., Steven R. Rick, Gianni Giacomelli, Haoran Wen, Robert J. Laubacher, Nancy Taubenslag, Pranav Ragupathy, Jared R. Curhan, Thomas W. Malone, Max Sina Knicker, and Younes Jeddi. Collective Intelligence Vol. 3, No. 4 (2024).
Park, Soya, Jaeyoon Song, David R. Karger, and Thomas W. Malone. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction Vol. CSCW1, No. 158 (2024): 1-34.
Malone, Thomas W. Asian Management Insights, March 2024.
Laubacher, Robert, Annalyn Bachman, Kathleen Kennedy, and Thomas W. Malone, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6961-23. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, December 2023.
Learnright laws would give copyright holders the exclusive right to license their content for artificial intelligence model training.
They’re nearly all about artificial intelligence, with a guest appearance from quantum computing.
Professor Thomas W. Malone and co-author wrote: "When an AI system can instantly mimic or paraphrase creative content, it reduces the incentive to purchase original work. That's why we need a new intellectual property protection — a 'learnright law' that gives creators control over whether AI systems learn from their work. True, licensing would cost AI companies in the short term. But if they continue using copyrighted work to train AI without paying for it, they'll erode the very incentives that drive creation in the first place."
Artificial intelligence could transform the economy faster than any previous technology, and policymakers must move equally quickly to figure out how to respond, a group of economists and researchers are warning. The statement, titled "We Must Act Now,"was signed by nearly 200 people, including 15 Nobel laureates. MIT Sloan signatories are Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu, professor Sinan Aral, assistant professor Michiel Bakker, research scientist Christian Catalini, Professor Emeritus Bengt Holmström, professor Simon Johnson, professor Thomas W. Malone, professor Scott Stern, and principal research scientist Neil Thompson.
Professor Thomas Malone and co-authors have developed a new way of analyzing work, to help predict which jobs are most vulnerable to AI disruption. "Instead of focusing primarily on jobs," said Malone, "we focus on the detailed activities that people and machines do at work." AI mainly threatens workers who manage information. But not all of them. Malone noted that some industries demand human empathy, a sense of ethics, and a knack for teamwork.
If a company is struggling financially, saying AI drove cuts definitely makes for a better story, said professor Thomas Malone. There's also a long history of overshooting predictions of the impact and adoption rate of new tech, he said. It happened in the dotcom era and with autonomous driving. "I do think many people are overestimating the rate at which jobs will change," Malone said about AI projections.
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