Higher Education Leadership Forum: Expertise, Artificial Intelligence, and the Work of the Future
MIT Professor and Economist David Autor discusses how intentional design can shape a future where AI enhances, rather than replaces, human expertise.
David Autor, MIT Professor, Economist, and leading expert on labor markets and technology
The future of work is not a forecasting exercise—it’s a design problem. And design is badly needed because AI opens new opportunities for the labor market and poses new risks.
This session presents a framework for thinking about the future of work that puts human expertise at its center. Through intentional design choices, we can use AI as a force multiplier for human expertise rather than a replacement for it.
About the speaker
David Autor
Daniel (1972) and Gail Rubinfeld Professor
Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow
MIT Department of Economics
David Autor is the Daniel (1972) and Gail Rubinfeld Professor in the MIT Department of Economics, codirector of the NBER Labor Studies Program and the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work. His scholarship explores the labor-market impacts of technological change and globalization on job polarization, skill demands, earnings levels and inequality, and electoral outcomes.
Autor has received numerous awards for both his scholarship—the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the Sherwin Rosen Prize for outstanding contributions to the field of Labor Economics, the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2019, the Society for Progress Medal in 2021—and for his teaching, including the MIT MacVicar Faculty Fellowship in 2018 and Best Instructor award from the MIT Graduate Economic Association in 2025. In 2020, Autor received the Heinz 25th Special Recognition Award from the Heinz Family Foundation for his work “transforming our understanding of how globalization and technological change are impacting jobs and earning prospects for American workers.” In 2023, Autor was selected as one of two researchers across all scientific fields a NOMIS Distinguished Scientist. Autor was one of five senior scholars selected by the Schmidt Sciences Foundation as an AI2050 Senior Fellow in 2024. Autor is also a Visiting Fellow in the Google Technology and Society Program.
The Economist magazine labeled Autor in 2019 as “The academic voice of the American worker.” Later that same year, and with equal or greater justification, he was christened “Twerpy MIT Economist” by John Oliver of Last Week Tonight in a segment on automation and employment.