Ideas Made to Matter
Artificial Intelligence
AI Expert Spotlight: Danielle Li
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We asked several MIT experts about their latest projects and what they see as the most exciting—and concerning—aspects of the AI boom.
Danielle Li, Professor of Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management
studies the ways AI impacts the nature of work and the workplace. “I’m less interested in what AI tools are technically capable of, and more interested in how businesses put these tools to use, how they impact the productivity of workers, the type of work they are able to do, and what their careers might look like in an AI-intensive world,” she says.
What do you see as the biggest opportunity in working with AI?
I think, at its most generous, AI tools enable us to learn from our collective actions. Before AI technologies were in place, someone might have written a terrific news article, or found the right way to help an upset customer, or done a great job of sorting through resumes and identifying people with the most potential—and that work would be very productive in the moment, but it would have gotten lost in time. When someone else was faced with a similar challenge, they probably wouldn’t remember what solution that person came up with, and wouldn’t be inspired by it. We miss many opportunities to learn from others, and from our past selves.
What AI tools do is they take all of those solutions, those attempts—whether good or bad—and use them as training data to build models. Now, of course there are many challenges in building good models, but I think what’s exciting is that these tools allow our experiences to be remembered, analyzed, and used as the foundation to form new solutions. So your work yesterday can help someone else, in some other job, in some other country, and their work can help yours in turn. The gains from this kind of knowledge transfer can be incredible.
What are the biggest areas for caution in working with AI?
Many people are already aware of issues such as model reliability and concerns about job destruction and existential threats. One important concern is that businesses need to think a lot more carefully about when to use AI tools and how.
My sense is that there’s this general FOMO about AI that has led many business leaders to think that one is at risk of being “disrupted” if one isn’t making AI part of the business. With that mindset, it’s easy for any AI-based idea to gain traction, even if it’s a bad idea.
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