7 Key Insights From The New MIT Report on The Future of Work

The MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future (WotF) recently released its preliminary report, “The Work of the Future: Shaping Technology and Institutions.” 

The report is full of valuable insights, and is available for download on the Task Force’s website. The Task Force started from the premise that "work is intrinsically valuable to individuals and to society as a whole, and we should seek to improve rather than eliminate it." The report seeks to give a balanced assessment of the likely effects of emerging technologies on work in the future, describing both reasons for concern and opportunities to shape change in positive ways. 

What are some of the most important findings in the new report? The Good Companies, Good Jobs Initiative at MIT Sloan asked Elisabeth B. Reynolds, the Executive Director of WotF and one of the report’s authors, to summarize some of its key points. Here’s what Reynolds, who is also one of the Good Companies, Good Jobs Initiative's affiliated researchers, shared with us:

1. There’s a reason for the pessimism people feel about the future of work: The economic benefits of technological advances have not been widely shared in recent decades. 
   
   There is anxiety and uncertainty about the future of work in society, despite a relatively strong job market. These feelings are not unfounded, but grounded in reality. 
   
   Technological progress, essential to economic growth and improving living standards, has in recent years delivered neither the level of productivity growth we would hope for, nor shared prosperity for all. In the U.S., for those with less than a college degree, there has been little rise in wages over the past several decades. The economic progress of minority workers has also stalled. And less economically vibrant places are being left behind as their populations decline and grow older.
2. Technology has contributed to economic polarization. 
   
   Although technology is not the only factor contributing to economic and employment polarization, it has clearly played a role in exacerbating inequality, as “middle-skill” jobs in offices and factories that provided good wages to less-educated workers have been lost to automation. What’s more, the introduction of what some scholars call “so-so” technologies like self-checkout kiosks in retail stores has potentially led to the displacement of workers but only modest productivity gains.
3. But with an aging population, we aren’t likely to face a job shortage. 
   
   Our challenge going forward is not the quantity of jobs but the quality of jobs. Demographic forces – one of the few things we can confidently predict going forward – will create labor scarcity, not labor abundance. Restrictive immigration policies will also play a role here. Indeed, employers already cite automation as a response to today’s shortage of workers.
4. Widespread adoption of new technologies in the workplace is likely to occur gradually. 
   
   While the challenges we face are urgent, the adoption of new technologies is not occurring overnight the way some popular discussions would suggest. For example, industry has recently been ratcheting back expectations for progress in self-driving vehicles. Robots are moving out of factories and into warehousing, retail, farming, and medical services, and they will certainly displace a lot of relatively low-paid work, but that will happen slowly. What’s more, as the report points out, “not all robots displace workers.” Robots can, in fact, be used to complement human work and make workers more productive.
   
   Artificial intelligence’s broader impact on work is more uncertain. AI’s most successful application has been in machine learning, which differs from previous waves of automation in that it applies to high-education as well as low-education jobs and can learn as it works. But today, most AI applications apply at the task-level, automating only part of an occupation. What’s more, AI’s effects are also unfolding slowly and vary across industry and firm size.
5. We need to focus on skills development for the workforce. 
   
   Enabling workers—especially those who lack strong technical training or college education—to develop new skills through ongoing learning is critical. We should strengthen programs that have proven successful in workforce development, spreading the best practices of successful community college programs and work-based sectoral training programs. We should also encourage the innovation and experimentation going on in emerging areas of training and education, such as online learning and new non-degree credentials, but evaluate these programs rigorously.
   
   And it’s important to keep in mind that, even though middle-skill jobs are declining in the aggregate, in the coming decades we will have significant demand for workers in new healthcare jobs as well as in production and trade jobs that require some post-high-school training. But improving skills will not be enough. We need other policy and institutional reforms.
6. On a policy level, the U.S. should rebalance incentives for capital relative to labor. 
   
   The U.S. currently has many tax incentives to invest in physical capital, but far fewer incentives to invest in human capital. This also applies more broadly to the U.S. practice of shareholder capitalism—where maximizing shareholder value is seen as the sole purpose of the corporation. We need to return to stakeholder capitalism, where workers and communities are important constituencies along with shareholders. This includes strengthening workers’ voice and representation.
7. On a national level, we need to reinvigorate investment in advanced technologies—and simultaneously invest in fostering organizational innovation to implement those technologies in ways that complement workers. 
   
   We need to reinvigorate the US leadership position in AI-related technologies through R&D investments. Other countries are surpassing or are close to surpassing the US in this dimension.  This is one area where we cannot afford to fall behind given the range of applications of these technologies. By leading in the development of them, we also help shape their trajectory toward broader goals for the country. 
   
   And, while new technologies are often readily available to firms, their successful adoption and implementation depends upon organizational innovation –– often involving the engagement of workers in the adoption of new technologies and the redesigning of work, a complicated process. We need to encourage and incentivize firms to learn from best practices in this area.