Dialogue: Using Innovation to Complement Workers
MIT is partnering with Amazon to develop best practices for introducing new technologies alongside quality jobs.
Dr. Julie Shah of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology joined the MLC’s Board of Governors in 2022. Since then, she has participated in MLC’s Rethink and Manufacturing in 2030 events, speaking about the use of AI in manufacturing and its implications for the manufacturing workforce. In October of last year, MIT announced a partnership with Amazon to research how best to use innovative technologies such as AI and robotics to complement rather than replace workers. The Manufacturing Leadership Journal recently sat down with Dr. Shah to discuss her work and the objectives of the partnership with Amazon.
Q: Could you describe your role at MIT and your areas of concentration from a research and teaching perspective?
A: I’m the H.N. Slater Professor in MIT’s Aeronautics and Astronautics department. I also co-lead MIT’s Work of the Future initiative, directing cross-disciplinary research on how innovation impacts jobs. My own AI and robotics lab aims to imagine the future of work by designing collaborative AI teammates that enhance human capability. I partner with companies to translate these ideas into real-world industries — manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, aerospace, and more. At MIT, I teach classes focused on human-centered design of AI, robotics, and autonomous systems. And through cross-campus initiatives like the Work of the Future, we’re engaging policymakers, academics, and industry leaders to shape a more positive future enabled by technology.
Q: You were one of the key people involved with MIT’s Work of the Future initiative, a report on which was published in 2020. Could you summarize some of the key findings of that report?
A: MIT’s former president, Rafael Reif, convened a three-year task force back in 2018 during a time of high anxiety about automation and its potential to displace jobs. Some forecasts predicted that up to half of all jobs were vulnerable. The task force took an interdisciplinary approach to evaluating those claims. What we found was a much more nuanced story — new technologies did not appear to be eliminating jobs outright, but technological progress was also not contributing to widely shared prosperity.
For example, our researchers found that robots are often inaccessible for small and medium enterprises, which employ nearly half the US manufacturing workforce. This leads to unequal productivity distribution, with large firms able to achieve much higher productivity than smaller ones.
EXECUTIVE PROFILE: Dr. Julie Shah
Title: H.N. Slater Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. Leads the Interactive Robotics Group of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Education: Ph.D from MIT in 2011.
Previous Roles:
– Boeing Research and Technology
About the author:
David R. Brousell is Co-Founder, Vice President, and Executive Director at the NAM’s Manufacturing Leadership Council.
