This new blog from the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future creates an opportunity for the MIT community, predominantly students, to write about their ideas, research, and reflections on the relationship between technology, work, and society. We are particularly interested in what the younger generation thinks about this topic, as they are likely to have the most interaction with new technologies and the changing workplace, and shaping both. Below we outline some of what we consider to be the MIT Work of the Future’s overarching beliefs that will guide this effort over the next few years. We look forward to engaging with the broader community, at MIT and beyond, on this topic that is of critical importance to us all.
Guiding Beliefs
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The future is something that we create; it is not something that just happens to us. An irony of fatalism is that its passivity also shapes the future.
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Technological progress raises productivity, which is the foundation of rising human prosperity. We need only look to the last two centuries of technological advance to see how it has transformed the human condition, enabling us to live longer, healthier, more interesting lives, and freed a substantial fraction of the world’s population from starvation, disease, and backbreaking toil. We have every reason to believe that emerging technologies will further this process, enabling us to do more with less, to solve problems on a local and global scale, and to address critical human, environmental, and planetary needs.
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Technological change grows the size of the economic pie but it does not guarantee that all slices will grow equally. Absent policy intervention, some slices will shrink even as others expand dramatically. Technological change provides us with opportunities to improve human welfare, but neither the technology nor the market system guarantee that material prosperity will lead to greater human prospering. The outcome depends on individual and collective choices, on societal institutions, and on leadership.
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Technological progress is not like global warming, a problem we wish we didn’t have to face. It’s more akin to fossil fuel: a resource that has powered our development and, in many senses, made modern society feasible, but which has simultaneously created some unanticipated consequences with which we must contend.
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We are unconvinced by the argument that the advance of artificial intelligence and robotics spells the end of human work. Similar predictions have been made at the cusp of other great technological advances, and have never proven true. Even as we have liberated ourselves over two centuries from much of the work of the past, we have continually developed new products, services, activities, and objectives that have spurred ever rising demand for human expertise, judgment, and creativity.