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MIT FutureTech Research Group
webfuturetech.mit.edu·futuretech.mit.edu/
MIT FutureTech is an academic research group studying the economic and societal implications of AI and automation; useful as a reference for empirical work on AI deployment impacts and labor market effects relevant to AI governance discussions.
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Summary
MIT FutureTech is a research group at MIT focused on studying the economic and societal impacts of emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence. The group conducts empirical research on how AI and automation affect labor markets, productivity, and innovation. Their work informs policy discussions around the governance and deployment of advanced technologies.
Key Points
- •Conducts empirical research on AI's economic impacts, including effects on labor markets and productivity
- •Examines how automation and AI adoption affect workers, firms, and industries
- •Produces policy-relevant research to inform governance of emerging technologies
- •Affiliated with MIT, bridging technical and economic/social science perspectives on AI
- •Relevant to understanding capability diffusion and societal adaptation to AI systems
Cited by 2 pages
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| AI Alignment | Approach | 91.0 |
| AI Evaluation | Approach | 72.0 |
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FutureTech Research Data & Resources News Events 2025 FutureTech Conference We are an interdisciplinary group that studies the foundations of progress in computing: what are the most important trends, how do they underpin economic prosperity, and how can we harness them to sustain and promote productivity growth.
Latest news & insights
Can Academic Science Keep Up with the AI Frontier?
Tracking the meteoric rise of AI foundation models in science and the constraints on future breakthroughs.
March 12, 2026 The U.S. Launches a Peace Corps for AI to Compete With China
The Trump administration hopes to enlist the U.S. tech industry in its AI race.
March 2, 2026 Effective AI in the Workplace: What the Research Shows
What does effective AI in the workplace actually look like? Not hype. Not fear. Research. In our latest blog, MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) researchers break down what the evidence really shows about AI at work.
February 26, 2026 Featured Research
June 2025 Expertise
David Autor & Neil Thompson When job tasks are automated, does this augment or diminish the value of labor in the tasks that remain? We argue the answer depends on whether removing tasks raises or reduces the expertise required for remaining non-automated tasks. Since the same task may be relatively expert in one occupation and inexpert in another, automation can simultaneously replace experts in some occupations while augmenting expertise in others. We propose a conceptual model of occupational task bundling that predicts that changing occupational expertise requirements have countervailing wage and employment effects: automation that decreases expertise requirements reduces wages but permits the entry of less expert workers; automation that raises requirements raises wages but reduces the set of qualified workers. We develop a novel, content-agnostic method for measuring job task expertise, and we use it to quantify changes in occupational expertise demands over four decades attributable to job task removal and addition. We document that automation has raised wages and reduced employment in occupations where it eliminated inexpert tasks, but lowered wages and increased employment in occupations where it eliminated expert tasks. These effects are distinct from—and in the case of employment, opposite to—the effects of changing task quantities. The expertise framework resolves the puzzle of why routine task automation has lowered employment but often raised wages in routine task-intensive occupations. It provides a general tool for analyzing how task automation and new task creation reshape the scarcity value of human expertise within and across occupations.
August 2024 The AI Risk Repository: A Comprehensive Meta-Review, Database, and Taxonomy of Risks From Artificial Intelligence
Peter Slattery, Alexander K. Saeri, Emily A. C. Grundy, Jess Graham, Michael Noetel, Risto Uuk, James Dao, Soroush Pour, Stephen Casper, Neil Thompson The risks
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