Concerns grow about the platforms that dominate online speech
Social media has struck many nerves. Once an online extension of dating sites, friendly chats, database searches, and public relations campaigns, it has matured into a creature with far-reaching tentacles.
Our homes, our workplaces, and our society are now connected online in unprecedented–and some say, dangerous — ways. MIT IDE Director, Sinan Aral, has written extensively about the huge impact of social media in his book, The Hype Machine. In a recent interview he noted that “we’re witnessing, in real time, society grappling with the emergence of social media as a very powerful force.”
Cities with strong job market connectivity are more economically resilient, study finds
By Jesse DeLaughter, Sociotechnical Systems Research Center, for MIT News
What makes urban labor markets more resilient? This is the question at the heart of a new study, published in Nature Communications by members of MIT’s Connection Science Group.
Economists, policymakers, city planners, and companies have a strong interest in determining what factors contribute to healthy job markets, including what factors can help promote faster recovery after a shock, such as a major recession or the current Covid-19 pandemic. Traditional modeling approaches in this realm have treated workers as narrowly linked to specific jobs. In the real world, however, jobs…
On-demand jobs will continue to grow in the post-pandemic economy — will wages and benefits rise, too?
By Paula Klein
The inequities faced by on-demand workers compared to full-time employees are familiar although recent legal challenges have met with mixed results. Uber drivers in the U.K. successfully petitioned the courts to count 70,000 of them as full-time employees so they can gain important health benefits and wages. In California, on the other hand, ride-sharing companies — Uber and Lyft — prevailed over workers in similar disputes. Around the globe, fair compensation for online contract workers is in the spotlight.
Behind the scenes is a less-known digital economy worker. In 2019 Siddharth Suri, Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft…
What does it mean in 2021 to rescue the truth or to humanize digital design? Why are free speech and antitrust heated issues once again?
In fact, new conversations, debates, and developments in all of these critical areas are not only timely, but essential in today’s digital world. On April 22 the MIT IDE Social Media Summit aims to spark dialogs that will lead to more promising outcomes.
“Social media has become a potent global force and it’s the job of business, public-sector and academic leaders to understand and interpret its complexity,” said MIT IDE Director, Sinan Aral, who will…
Researchers say baking in privacy, transparency, and fairness will improve machine decision-making
By Paula Klein
Algorithmic decision-making has been criticized for its potential to lead to privacy invasion, information inequities, opacity, and discrimination. However, IDE co-lead and MIT Professor Alex Pentland, and his collaborators, say more human-centric Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches can be incorporated swiftly in the areas of privacy and data ownership, accountability and transparency, and fairness — if there is a collaborative and concerted effort. In a recent research paper, Ethical Machines: The Human-centric Use of Artificial Intelligence, the authors urge multi-disciplinary teams of researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and citizens to prioritize, co-develop, and evaluate these processes to benefit all.
…
Sharing fake news online isn’t as intentional as you may think
By Peter Dizikes, MIT News Office
Stopping the spread of political misinformation on social media may seem like an impossible task. But a new study co-authored by MIT scholars finds that most people who share false news stories online do so unintentionally, and that their sharing habits can be modified through reminders about accuracy.
When such reminders are displayed, it can increase the gap between the percentage of true news stories and false news stories that people share online, as shown in online experiments that the researchers developed.
“Getting people to think about accuracy makes them more discerning in their…
Algorithms are designed into the clothing company’s business model and culture
By Thomas Davenport
Stitch Fix is one of the more interesting and faster-growing retailers of the last decade. Founded in 2011, its 2020 revenue — though hurt by the sluggish COVID-19 economy— was $1.7 billion, and it had 3.5 million active clients. Retail personalization services are becoming standard practices in the industry, but at Stich Fix, the online personal styling service relies on AI algorithms alongside human stylists to make client recommendations of clothing, shoes, and accessories.
The goal of the combined human-machine sources of intelligence is to provide clients with a “Fix” — a mailed box of five personalized…
Researchers see a sweet spot where humanities and STEM skills complement one another and add value
Over the past few decades, business, engineering, and other professions not previously associated with the liberal arts have reluctantly embraced a number of its attributes. A few years ago, for example, I came across an about the efforts of Roger Martin to transform business education. At the time, was the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. He had long been advocating “that students needed to learn how to think critically and creatively every bit as much as they needed to learn finance or accounting.
More specifically, they needed to learn how…
MIT’s Andrew McAfee emphasizes the gains over the pains
How can technology continue to drive positive progress in our world? Do we need to constrain growth or embrace it in order to improve both the human condition and the state of nature?
These are questions Andrew McAfee has studied at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) for many years and he has answers. A recently launched IDE research group, Tech for Good, will amplify the IDE’s ongoing premise that “we need faster, more inclusive technology progress and access- not a slowdown-to meet the needs of today and of the future.”
AI, machine learning, automation, reskilling, and retraining…
MIT researchers say that the more people know about vaccine acceptance by others, the more like they are to be vaccinated
Public health officials have issued plenty of warnings about people who are reluctant to get vaccinated for Covid-19. But an MIT research team centered at MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) says this may be counterproductive: When shown basic numbers about how popular Covid-19 vaccines are, the fraction of people reluctant to get the vaccine drops by 5 percent. To reach these conclusions, the team drew on a massive international survey about the pandemic, including 1.8 million responses from 67 countries, and developed an experiment covering 300,000 people in 23 countries. The researchers described their findings in a working…
MIT IDE
Addressing one of the most critical issues of our time: the impact of digital technology on businesses, the economy, and society.
