Category: Future of Work
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“Labor productivity growth has been the engine of US economic power and prosperity since World War II, adding 2.2 percent annually to economic growth and contributing mightily to a 1.7 percent annual gain in real incomes,” said a recent report by the Mckinsey Global Institute, “Rekindling US productivity for a new era.” But since 2005, “US…
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What’s the current state of AI? I’ve been closely following AI over the past several years, and based on everything I’ve read and written about in my blog, the question brings to mind Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. We have in fact a tale of two very different AI worlds. Ever since OpenAI…
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“The societal and economic spasms of the early 2020s highlighted the crucial role of world-spanning supply chains in the modern global economy, as well as the growing role of digital technology, including A.I. and automation, in the future economy,” wrote MIT professor Yossi Sheffi in the Preface of his new book The Magic Conveyor Belt:…
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A few weeks ago, Richard Reeves was Ezra Klein’s guest in his NY Times podcast “The Men — and Boys — Are Not Alright.” Reeves is a writer and Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he’s been studying inequality, poverty, social mobility, and family policy. His book, — Of Boys and Men: Why the…
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The 2023 AI Index Report was released in early April by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, it’s sixth annual analysis of the impact, progress, and trends of AI. Led by an interdisciplinary group of experts from across academia and industry, the report aims to be the world’s most authoritative source for data and…
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Throughout the Industrial Revolution there were periodic panics about the impact of automation on jobs, going back to the Luddites, – textile workers who in the 1810s smashed the new machines that were threatening their jobs. But each time those fears arose in the past, technology advances ended up creating more jobs than they destroyed. Automation…
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“In one of the richest nations on earth, the path to prosperity has narrowed significantly in recent decades — especially for those without a college education,” wrote the NY Times in its January 28 editorial, “See Workers as Workers, Not as a College Credential.” “More than 62 percent of Americans ages 25 and up do…
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Large language models (LLMs) — e.g., BERT, GPT-3, — and chatbots like ChatGPT, are quite impressive. In the coming years, they will likely lead to a number of transformative tools and applications. They may well herald a coming AI revolution. But, how much closer are they getting us to the kind of general intelligence that,…
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“The COVID-19 pandemic rewrote the rules, and now a new and potent disruption seems to arrive every other day,” said a recent McKinsey article, What matters most? Six priorities for CEOs in turbulent times. “You know the list of issues; we won’t go through them here. Suffice to say that managing complex organizations is much harder…
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Several weeks ago I listened to a very interesting podcast, Are MBAs to Blame for Wage Stagnation, with Freakonomics Radio host, Stephen Dubner and MIT economist Daron Acemoglu. The podcast discussed a working paper by Acemoglu, Alex He, and Daniel le Maire on the effect of a CEO’s education on the wages of their company’s…
