Series of MIT Seminars on the Diffusion of Computerized Work

In theory, computerized work has the potential to dramatically affect employment and earnings as core technologies improve—natural language processing, speech recognition, robotic movements, machine vision, information retrieval, and context awareness in various domains. However, our understanding of these effects remains limited and much of the current discussion remains speculative.

Economist Frank Levy will organize a series of MIT seminars beginning January 1, 2014 through June 30, 2015, to educate computer scientists and roboticists (CS/R), economists and others on the diffusion of computerized work, as well as to increase contact between the two groups of faculty. The seminar series will focus on bringing in industry people and develop case studies of particular technologies and their impacts. Such studies would generate hypotheses that could be tested using nationally representative datasets or could form the basis for simulation models.