The rapid development of artificial intelligence technologies around the globe has led to increasing calls for robust AI policy: laws that let innovation flourish while protecting people from privacy violations, exploitive surveillance, biased algorithms, and more. But the drafting and passing of such laws has been anything but easy. “This is a very complex problem,” Luis Videgaray PhD ’98, director of MIT’s AI Policy for the World Project, said in a lecture on Wednesday afternoon. “This is not something that will be solved in a single report. This has got to be a collective conversation, and it will take a while. It will be years in the making.” Throughout his talk, Videgaray outlined an ambitious vision of AI policy around the globe, one that is sensitive to economic and political dynamics, and grounded in material fairness and democratic deliberation. “Trust is probably the most important problem we have,” Videgaray said. Videgaray’s talk, “From Principles to Implementation: The Challenge of AI Policy Around the World,” was part of the Starr Forum series of public discussions about topics of global concern. The Starr Forum is hosted by MIT’s Center for International Studies. Videgaray gave his remarks to a standing-room crowd of over 150 in MIT’s Building E25....

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On April 22, the MIT Water Club hosted its annual Water Innovation Prize Pitch Night, the culminating event of a year-long international competition for student innovators seeking to launch water sector companies. This event, now in its sixth year, normally gathers over 250 people to MIT’s campus to cheer on finalist teams from around the world as they compete for cash awards. Yet, six weeks before the event, when the Water Club would usually be finalizing logistics and collecting RSVPs, Covid-19 upended our world. At the same time that the Water Club’s student leaders were gearing up for their event, the MIT Food and Agriculture Club was in its own final stages of planning its annual pitch competition, the Rabobank-MIT Food and Agribusiness Innovation Prize. Now in its fifth year, this event is a national innovation competition for student startups spanning all aspects of the food system. For both clubs, these events are the largest and highest-profile of the year and provide important networking and professional development opportunities for finalist teams and attendees. Bringing signature MIT resilience and ingenuity, student leaders from both clubs persevered through physical distancing measures, successfully pivoting both events to virtual space....

It’s one of the biggest economic changes in recent decades: Workers get a smaller slice of company revenue, while a larger share is paid to capital owners and distributed as profits. Or, as economists like to say, there has been a fall in labor’s share of gross domestic product, or GDP. A new study co-authored by MIT economists uncovers a major reason for this trend: Big companies that spend more on capital and less on workers are gaining market share, while smaller firms that spend more on workers and less on capital are losing market share. That change, the researchers say, is a key reason why the labor share of GDP in the U.S. has dropped from around 67 percent in 1980 to 59 percent today, following decades of stability. “To understand this phenomenon, you need to understand the reallocation of economic activity across firms,” says MIT economist David Autor, co-author of the paper. “That’s our key point.” To be sure, many economists have suggested other hypotheses, including new generations of software and machines that substitute directly for workers, the effects of international trade and outsourcing, and the decline of labor union power. The current study does not entirely rule out all of those explanations, but it does highlight the importance of what the researchers term “superstar firms” as a primary factor....