Press

Professor Simon Johnson sat down with fellow Nobel laureate economist Philippe Aghion to examine what ails Europe and how to revive its dynamism.

Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu said: "I am convinced that artificial intelligence is quite different from human intelligence. Humans are not very good at absorbing massive volumes of information or sifting through unstructured data for relevant patterns. A.I. models have, as yet, no genuine creativity and no capacity for trial-and-error learning grounded in interaction with the physical world. When two things are different, the last thing you want is to try to mimic one with the other. It is a fool's errand to try to get one to do everything that the other one does. They should work together."

"The area I am most excited about right now is the relationship between AI, leadership, and organizational change," said Peter Hirst, senior associate dean of executive education. "Of course, executives need to understand what AI is and what it can do. But the more interesting question is how leaders should make decisions, redesign work, build trust, develop people, and create value when technology is moving so quickly."

To better understand the challenge of complex systems, it is worth turning to a field that has been dealing with this challenge for decades: System Dynamics, developed at MIT and formalized in the work of professor John Sterman, author of "Business Dynamics." The System Dynamics vision formalizes what was already a reality: marketing is not a sequence of steps, but a feedback system. Everything influences everything else. As Sterman summarized, "cause and effect are distant in time and space."

Senior lecturer Ben Shields said perceptions of the tournament have been shaped by how expensive tickets and travel have been for a tournament taking place across an entire continent. That, he said, "does not seem to sit well with many. The hope for FIFA is that once the matches start and the greatest players in the world compete for the most prestigious prize of them all, the sport as business lens will fade into the background and the World Cup will be seen and experienced as the enduring global institution that it is."

IDE research scientist Frank Nagle said that companies that cut junior staff in the name of AI are making a "critical strategic mistake." He framed the problem in two dimensions. First, if companies don't hire junior people, they are missing out on choosing who will run the firm in a decade. Second, junior people benefit from using AI and reorienting their workflows more than senior people. "There’s a lot to be learned from the way that junior people are interacting with AI," Nagle said.