IWB Blog
A collection of observations, news and resources on the changing nature of innovation, technology, leadership, and other subjects.
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Category: Future of Work
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The 2025 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium took place on Tuesday, May 20 at the Royal Sonesta hotel overlooking the Charles River, a short walk from the MIT campus. Not surprisingly, AI was the dominant theme in this year’s Symposium, with a number of keynotes and panels on the topic. Over the past few years, the…
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“The emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has attracted significant attention for its potential economic impact,” wrote economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li, and Lindsey Raymond in a recently published article, “Generative AI at Work.” “Although various generative AI tools have performed well in laboratory settings, questions remain about their effectiveness in the real world, where…
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Wikipedia defines Agentic AI as “a class of artificial intelligence that focuses on autonomous systems that can make decisions and perform tasks without human intervention.” A recent IBM website, “What is Agentic AI,” adds that: “Agentic systems provide the flexibility of LLMs, which can generate responses or actions based on nuanced, context-dependent understanding, with the…
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Hard Fork is a weekly podcast from the NY Times that examines the impact of the latest developments in technology on the economy and society. The podcast is hosted by Kevin Roose, NY Times technology journalist, and Casey Newton, founder of the Platformer newsletter. A few weeks ago the podcast discussed Is AI a ‘Normal'…
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After decades of promise and hype, AI has (finally) come of age. The 2010s saw increasingly powerful deep learning systems surpass human levels of performance in tasks like image and speech recognition, skin and breast cancer detection, and winning at championship-level Go. The 2020s saw the advent of generative AI systems, with their impressive ability…
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Work from home (WFH) has been around for decades. The share of people working from home three or more days per week was under 1% in 1980, growing modestly with the rise of the Internet to around 2.4% in 2010 and 4% in 2018. Then came Covid-19, forcing tens of millions around the world to…
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“AI is changing the cost and availability of expertise, and that will fundamentally alter how businesses organize and compete,” said “Strategy in an Era of Abundant Expertise,” a Harvard Business Rreview (HBR) article by Harvard Business School professor Karim R. Lakhani and Microsoft corporate strategists Bobby Yerramilli-Rao, John Corwin, and Yang Li. At its most…
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Postscript: On May 16, 2025, MIT issued a press release explaining the concerns raised about the integrity of the research in the preprint of the paper “Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation” that was published on arXiv in November 2024 and referenced in this blog. ======================================================================================= On December 29, the WSJ published “Will AI…
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“Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has the potential to drive significant improvements in workforce productivity at the level of tasks, organizations and economies,” said a recent report “Leveraging Generative AI for Job Augmentation and Workforce Productivity: Scenarios, Case Studies and a Framework for Action,” by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with PwC. “Delivering those gains…
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General purpose technologies (GPTs) are the defining technologies of their times. They are engines for growth that can radically transform the economic environment. “Early versions of GPTs often look very different from their mature forms,” wrote MIT’s Isabella Loaiza and Roberto Rigobon in “The EPOCH of AI: Human-Machine Complementarities at Work.” “Only after waves of…