Category Archives: Information Technology

The future of work in developing economies – Pablo Egaña del Sol and Connor Joyce

Pablo Egana Del Sol, Research Affiliate,
International Faculty Fellows Program

From MIT Sloan Management Review

Much has been written about the rise of automation in developed countries. Economists have been busily creating models seeking to quantify the likely impact of automation on employment.1 However, far less has been written about the potential effects on work in developing nations. This is surprising, given that automation may be especially troublesome for developing economies.

We know that economic growth brings significant shifts toward higher-skilled occupations and that the economies of many developing nations rely largely on manual labor and routinized manufacturing work. Because some types of manual and routinized work can be easily handled by computers, machinery, and artificial intelligence, it’s clear that large-scale automation could have significant and wide-reaching effects on workers in developing countries.

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Is technology sabotaging you? – Tara Swart

MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer, Tara Swart

From Psychology Today

From Fitbit to HeadSpace to budgeting app Mint, technology is often billed as the solution to sticking to our New Year’s resolutions. With 80% of resolutions failing by February, the ability to track our exercise, food, weight, spending, and meditation habits at our fingertips seems like a no-brainer.

But is technology actually making it harder for us to stick to our goals? What if we are embracing the very mechanism responsible for sabotaging our good intentions?

Technology is highly addictive, by design. In a recent BBC investigation, a former Silicon Valley insider said social media companies were sprinkling “behavioral cocaine” over smartphone apps, adding features that deliberately keep us addicted. If not kept in check, using a smartphone app with the goal of sticking to your resolution may tempt you to do other things, such as checking your social media accounts instead.
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Is deep learning a game changer for marketing analytics? – Glen Urban, Artem Timoshenko, Paramveer Dhillon, and John R. Hauser

MIT Sloan Professor Glen Urban

Glen Urban, David Austin Professor in Marketing, Emeritus, and MIT Sloan School Dean, Emeritus

John R. Hauser, Kirin Professor of Marketing, MIT Sloan School of Management

From MIT Sloan Management Review 

Deep learning is delivering impressive results in AI applications. Apple’s Siri, for example, translates the human voice into computer commands that allow iPhone owners to get answers to questions, send messages, and navigate their way to and from obscure locations. Automated driving enables people today to go hands-free on expressways, and it will eventually do the same on city streets. In biology, researchers are creating new molecules for DNA-based pharmaceuticals.

Given all this activity with deep learning, many wonder how the underlying methods will alter the future of marketing. To what extent will they help companies design profitable new products and services to meet the needs of customers?

The technology that underpins deep learning is becoming increasingly capable of analyzing big databases for patterns and insights. It isn’t difficult to imagine a day when companies will be able to integrate a wide array of databases to discern what consumers want with greater sophistication and analytic power and then leverage that information for market advantage. For example, it may not be long before consumers, identified via facial recognition technology while grocery shopping, receive individualized coupons based on their previous purchase behavior. In the future, advertisements may be individually designed to appeal to consumers with different personalities and be delivered in real time as they view YouTube. Deep learning might also be used to design products to meet consumers’ personal needs, which could then be produced and delivered through automated 3D printing systems.

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The resurgence of tuberculosis is behavioral, not medical. Nudges can fix it – Erez Yoeli, David Rand, and Jon Rathauser

Erez Yoeli, research scientist at MIT’s Sloan School of Management

David Rand, Associate Professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT Sloan School of Management

From STAT

Nancy had been coughing for months. When she started experiencing chest pain, this bubbly mother of three and very proud grandmother went to see a doctor at her local clinic in Thika, about 20 miles northeast of Nairobi. He delivered a crushing diagnosis: She had contracted a drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis. That was in June 2016.

For the next eight months, Nancy went to the clinic daily to receive an injection of a strong antibiotic and take a cocktail of 15 pills that were also antibiotics. She became so weakened by the disease and her medications that she couldn’t walk. Her children carried her to the clinic for her daily visits and provided constant support and encouragement, but she still felt she was alone — she wasn’t working, and her friends avoided her out of fear of being infected by the disease.

Nancy is one of roughly 10 million people worldwide who develop tuberculosis each year. Once on the decline, TB has again become the world’s deadliest infectious disease, killing nearly 2 million people a year, more than malaria and HIV combined.

The cause of TB’s resurgence is not medical; a highly effective though burdensome treatment has existed for the disease since the mid-1940s. Instead, the cause is mostly behavioral: Faced with the prospect of extended treatment and isolating stigma, many people are slow to seek treatment or quit partway through. This fuels the tuberculosis epidemic by giving the disease ample opportunities to spread and mutate into drug-resistant strains like the one that infected Nancy.

If the fuel is behavioral, then the solution should be as well.

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Brazil at a crossroads: re-asserting the importance of science and technology for development – Ezequiel Zylberberg and Elisabeth Reynolds

Ezequiel Zylberberg, Research Affiliate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Industrial Performance Center

Elisabeth Reynolds, executive director of the MIT Industrial Performance Center

From Valor

The Brazilian government has pursued a state-led development approach for nearly a century. In the last twenty years, it has enacted various policies and programs explicitly designed to strengthen its national system of innovation. It has sought to build upon early successes in agriculture, commercial aviation, and deep sea oil & gas exploration to create new engines of growth for the 21st century.

Brazil has increased spending on science and technology, encouraged greater collaboration between industry and universities, and fostered the creation of new institutions whose primary aim is to facilitate greater private spending on research and development (R&D). Yet, recent headwinds threaten to derail what, despite several well-known shortcomings, has been a remarkable story of progress.

Beginning with the economic recession and political fallout associated with the Lava Jato corruption scandal that began in 2014, and continuing with the proposed dramatic cuts to science and technology spending and the ouster of respected leaders in the scientific community, Brazil’s science, technology, and innovation agenda has faced serious challenges and now faces an uncertain future.

During these difficult times, it is important for the business and scientific communities to re-assert the value of science, technology, and innovation, not as an end in itself, but as a platform for sustained economic growth and social development. Brazil cannot afford to fall behind as the pace of technological change quickens and the globalization of production and innovation grows in scale and scope.

It was in the context of these ongoing challenges that MIT’s Industrial Performance Center (IPC) began a five-year research collaboration with the Brazilian National Service for Industrial Training (SENAI) in 2014. The project recently culminated in the publication of a volume entitled Innovation in Brazil: Advancing Development in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2019, Portuguese edition by Elsevier forthcoming).

This book represents a true transnational collaboration. It includes contributions from MIT researchers as well as leading Brazilian academics and practitioners, and proposes a forward-looking innovation agenda for the country. This research will be the focus of an upcoming presentation at the MIT Sloan Future of Work Conference to be held on August 29th in São Paulo.

We find that in order to effectively accelerate innovation and position itself for growth in the 21st century, Brazil should address five key areas. First, the country should strengthen its engagement with the rest of the world through global value chains and knowledge networks. This is made more urgent by the arrival of a set of fast moving, complex, and globally integrated digital technologies.

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