Generative AI has taken the world by storm. Economists expect the technology to contribute to global GDP and productivity growth. How big will the effects of generative AI be? And what will firms have to do to realize the potential?

The McKinsey Global Institute has published The Economic Potential of Generative AI: The Next Productivity Frontier, which highlights generative AI’s potential trillion-dollar impact on the global economy, the industries that will draw the biggest value from generative AI, and what these implications mean for the workforce at large.

In his new book Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, MIT economist Simon Johnson (and co-author Daron Acemoglu), take a sweeping look across one thousand years of technological progress and find that past transformations like the agricultural and industrial revolutions did not automatically lead to shared prosperity. Rather, they benefited a narrow swathe of interests. As key decision-makers in how AI is deployed – whether used to replace or augment human capabilities – business leaders and policy makers play a critical role in determining whether we achieve shared prosperity. In a conversation with Center Director Vijay Gurbaxani, Professor Johnson shared the key insights from his book, highlighting impediments to shared prosperity in prior technology revolutions, and the changes to business and regulatory contexts that we should make to achieve equitable growth in the age of AI.

A main goal in knowledge work has been to maximize productivity; Dr. Mark will reframe that goal, especially for managers and team leaders, to instead optimize employee wellbeing. She will discuss research that shows that when feeling positive, people can do more. She will show how our attention spans on our screens have measurably diminished over the last twenty years. This type of attention-shifting among activities, or multitasking, harms our performance and causes stress. The reasons for our shortening attention spans are far broader than just dealing with external distractions—Dr. Mark will discuss how reasons for it can be tied to workplace environments and the broader sociotechnical world we live in.  She will also describe how, contrary to the idea that we are either focused or unfocused, our attention is far more nuanced. We have rhythms of focused attention throughout the day, but we also experience other types of attention which can provide benefits. Dr. Mark will then outline a path forward with solutions at the individual and collective levels for how we can attain agency over our behaviors to achieve greater wellbeing when we use our devices

Over the past 20 years, new information technologies have transformed nearly every sector of the global economy, upsetting the market power of firms and creating abundant choice, interactivity, and personalization for customers. For a long time, the one sector remarkably absent from this transformation was higher education. In this talk, Professor Smith will discuss why higher education has been able to resist the forces of digital transformation that have altered so many other industries, why current market forces make higher education ripe for disruption, how disruption might impact structure and competition in the market for higher education, and what opportunities disruption could create for digitization research.

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The early advantages the United States and its allies held in cyberspace have largely disappeared as the internet has become increasingly fragmented, more dangerous, and less free, according to a new Independent Task Force report sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). In this talk, CFR Senior Fellow and Task Force Director Adam Segal and cybersecurity expert and Task Force Member Nicole Perlroth discuss the implications of the end of the global internet era, the value of building a trusted internet coalition with U.S. allies, and other findings and recommendations from the report Confronting Reality in Cyberspace: Foreign Policy for a Fragmented Internet.

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The spread of misinformation is ancient, complex, yet ubiquitous in media concerning elections, vaccinations, and global climate policy.  Digital platforms have exacerbated the problem.  How should a platform or a society address the problem of fake news?  Join us for a stimulating conversation on this critical topic as Marshall Van Alstyne discusses his new publication, “Free Speech, Platforms & The Fake News Problem.”

Marshall Van Alstyne is an expert on platform strategies and network business models.  His research impact ranks among the top 2% of all scientists globally. He was named in the Top 50 Management Thinkers in the World (2021) and is coauthor of the international bestseller “Platform Revolution.”

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If you have a smartphone, you have AI in your pocket. AI is impossible to avoid online. And it has already changed everything from how doctors diagnose disease to how you interact with friends or read the news. But in Rule of the Robots, Martin Ford argues that the true revolution is yet to come.

Martin presents a striking vision of the very near future. He argues that AI is a uniquely powerful technology that is altering every dimension of human life, often for the better. For example, advanced science is being done by machines, solving devilish problems in molecular biology that humans could not, and AI can help us fight climate change or the next pandemic. It also has a capacity for profound harm. Deep fakes—AI-generated audio or video of events that never happened—are poised to cause havoc throughout society. AI empowers authoritarian regimes like China with unprecedented mechanisms for social control. And AI can be deeply biased, learning bigoted attitudes from us and perpetuating them.

In short, this is not a technology to simply embrace, or let others worry about. The machines are coming, and they won’t stop, and each of us needs to know what that means if we are to thrive in the twenty-first century. And Rule of the Robots is the essential guide to all of it: both AI and the future of our economy, our politics, our lives.

Hear Martin Ford and CDT Director Vijay Gurbaxani in a discussion about what happens as AI takes over our lives.

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Cultivating diverse, equitable, and inclusive (DEI) work environments is an important issue everywhere and more so in tech. With tech jobs growing rapidly in every sector of the economy, it’s vital to provide these exciting career opportunities to all. With a more diverse talent pool, we can build more fair and representative systems in a world that is increasingly run on software.

Listen in on a conversation with Merage alumna Rashmi Kumar, SVP & CIO at HP Enterprise, Ian Williamson, Dean of The Paul Merage School of Business, and Center Director Vijay Gurbaxani on how DEI initiatives can advance your organization.

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Watch a recording between Vijay Gurbaxani and Sean J. Taylor, Head of Lyft Rideshare Labs, a data science organization at Lyft, discussing the longer term and riskier initiatives. Through a series of informative examples, Sean will talk about the value that data science brings to Lyft and how companies can build and apply data science competencies. Lyft, the rideshare platform company, is a sophisticated user of analytics and data in their operations. Strategic processes, including forecasting, planning, and pricing are data and algorithmic driven.

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COVID-19 has initiated an urgent transformation in businesses. As we focus on the post-pandemic world, there will be profound impacts on the products and services we will want, how we shop, how we learn, and more. Transformation efforts are being redirected and accelerated. While businesses will determine their strategies, they will also benefit from smart policies that enable governments and their citizens to prepare for and implement increased remote working, resilient education systems, and other remote-based activities.

BSA’s Victoria Espinel and Ha McNeill join in a conversation with Vijay Gurbaxani to discuss how leading companies are adapting to the new world and how new policies can facilitate the transformation.

Sinan Aral
Director, MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy
David Austin Professor of IT & Marketing
MIT Sloan School of Management
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Susan Doniz
CIO
SVP, IT & Data Analytics
Boeing
Biography >

Jeanne Ross
Principal Research Scientist
MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research (CISR)
Biography >

Aamir Lakhani, “Dr. Chaos”
Senior Security Strategist
Fortinet
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Pranav Parekh
Head of Customer Success API Management Solution
Apigee Google Cloud
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Phil Quade
CISO Technology Futurist/Evangelist
CISCO