Opinions from Massachusetts Institute Of Technology's alumni

Ray Kurzweil, Author, computer scientist, inventor and futurist

disagrees AI and robots might cause mass unemployment

We are going to have new types of jobs creating new types of dollars that don’t exist yet and that has been the trend. We will be creating more profound music, literature, science, technology.

John M. Richardson,

agrees Transgender individuals in the army

We treat every one of those sailors regardless with dignity and respect that is warranted by wearing the uniform of the United States Navy. By virtue of that approach, I’m not aware of any issues.

Benjamin Netanyahu,

agrees Surrogacy

Single mother have the right to the surrogacy process, but single fathers don’t have that right. It simply isn’t fair.

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate economist based at Columbia University

agrees Universal Health Care

As the gap between rich and poor keeps growing and part-time jobs become more common, we must strengthen the social safety net. Universal health coverage would give essential protection, and needs to be part of every society.

Robert Mundell, Canadian economist

agrees Tariffs

The United States can't keep a completely open system if the rest of the world is less open. The United States may have to take a leaf out of the book of Japan, China, and Germany, and have protectionism inside the system.

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate economist based at Columbia University

disagrees Tariffs

With the election of Trump, America's soft power has taken a big hit. The United States has moved from a position of leadership in the creation of a rules-based international system to a position of leadership in its destruction and the creation of a regime of global protectionism. The damage will be long-lasting.

Paul Krugman, Economist (nobel laureate) and NY Times columnist

disagrees Tariffs

Trump’s tariffs are badly designed even from the point of view of someone who shares his crude mercantilist view of trade. In fact, the structure of his tariffs so far is designed to inflict maximum damage on the U.S. economy, for minimal gain.

Elaine Chao,

disagrees Tariffs

Smoot and Hawley ginned up The Tariff Act of 1930 to get America back to work after the Stock Market Crash of '29. Instead, it destroyed trade so effectively that by 1932, American exports to Europe were just a third of what they had been in 1929. World trade fell two-thirds as other nations retaliated. Jobs evaporated.

Robert J. Shiller, Professor of economics at Yale and Nobel laureate

agrees Robot Tax

A moderate tax on robots, even a temporary tax that merely slows the adoption of disruptive technology, seems a natural component of a policy to address rising inequality. Revenue could be targeted toward wage insurance, to help people replaced by new technology make the transition to a different career. This would accord with our natural sense of justice, and thus be likely to endure.

David Dill, Computer scientist

disagrees Electronic voting

The way I look at things is: How many people have to conspire to steal an election now? With paper ballots at polling places, to steal a significant number of votes, you’d have to have lots of poll workers or a lot of voters voting fraudulently, which would be very difficult and expensive. And with paperless touchscreen voting you maybe need a few programmers. If you had widespread Internet voting... See More

Lawrence Summers, Economist and Harvard University Professor

agrees AI and robots might cause mass unemployment

It is widely feared that half the jobs in the economy might be eliminated by innovations such as self-driving vehicles, automatic checkout machines and expert systems that trade securities more effectively than humans can.

Greg Mankiw, Harvard professor in economics

agrees Carbon Tax

People don't want to think about climate change every time they do every decision. They can't. What a carbon tax does is it nudges them in the direction of doing the right thing. But you can cut other taxes in response.

Ray Kurzweil, Author, computer scientist, inventor and futurist

agrees Basic Income

Adopting a universal basic income for all people can help society think creatively with new ideas, develop new industries — and free-up people to work on important future projects. This practical social support program can grow as science & technology rapidly evolve, becoming part of world abundance.

Lawrence Krauss,

disagrees Creationism in schools

If you think about that, somehow saying that, well, anything goes, we shouldn’t offend religious beliefs by requiring kids to know – to understand reality; that’s child abuse. And if you think about it, teaching kids – or allowing the notion that the earth is 6,000 years old to be promulgated in schools is like teaching kids that the distance across the United States is 17 feet. That’s how big an ... See More

William A. Darity, Professor of Public Policy at Duke University

agrees Job Guarantee

Each job offered under a federal employment assurance would be at a wage rate above the poverty threshold, and would include benefits like health insurance. A public sector job guarantee would establish a quality of work and the level of compensation offered for all jobs. The program would be great for the country: It could meet a wide range of the nation’s physical and human infrastructure needs,... See More

Erik Brynjolfsson, Professor at MIT

agrees Carbon Tax

If we're willing to send half a million fellow citizens into battle, to protect oil supplies and our economic way of life, we should be no less willing to make the small sacrifice of paying more for gasoline. A revenue-neutral plan that reduced Social Security taxes by $1 billion for every penny a gallon of gas tax would leave the working poor and middle class better off than before. In the long t... See More

Andrew McAfee,

agrees AI and robots might cause mass unemployment

As digital devices like computers and robots get more capable thanks to Moore’s Law (the proposition that the number of transistors on a semiconductor can be inexpensively doubled about every two years), they can do more of the work that people used to do. Digital labor, in short, substitutes for human labor.

Paul Krugman, Economist (nobel laureate) and NY Times columnist

agrees Carbon Tax

Emissions taxes are the Economics 101 solution to pollution problems; every economist I know would start cheering wildly if Congress voted in a clean, across-the-board carbon tax.

Andrew Ng, Baidu; Stanford CS faculty; founded Coursera and Google Brain

disagrees AI will pose a serious risk to society within the next 50 years

Worrying about the rise of evil killer robots is like worrying about overpopulation and pollution on Mars before we've even set foot on it - an unnecessary distraction.

Andrew Ng, Baidu; Stanford CS faculty; founded Coursera and Google Brain

disagrees Basic Income

I do not believe in unconditional basic income because this just encourages people to be trapped in low skilled jobs without a meaningful path to climb up to do better work. So rather than to pay people to “do nothing” I would rather see a new “New deal” where we pay you to study because I think that today we know how to educate people at scale and the society is pretty good at finding meaningf... See More

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate economist based at Columbia University

disagrees Cryptocurrencies

[Governments will] regulate it out of existence.

Lawrence H. Summers, Harvard economist and former US Treasury secretary

agrees Soda taxes

We have strong evidence from around the world that raising taxes on products like tobacco, sugar sweetened beverages and alcohol is highly effective at reducing harmful consumption and saving lives. I think this is about as close to free-lunch, win-win policy as economists have found

Lawrence H. Summers, Harvard economist and former US Treasury secretary

agrees Health taxes

Andrew Ng, Baidu; Stanford CS faculty; founded Coursera and Google Brain

agrees Net neutrality

FCC's new "net neutrality" proposal is a horrible idea. Will hurt tech startups and users.

Mitchel Resnick, Professor of Learning Research at MIT Media Lab

agrees Everyone should learn how to code

I think the reasons for learning to code are the same as the reasons for learning to write. When we learn to write, we are learning how to organize, express, and share ideas. And when we learn to code, we are learning how to organize, express, and share ideas in new ways, in a new medium.

Mitchel Resnick, Professor of Learning Research at MIT Media Lab

agrees Older kids should work with younger kids in schools

Both groups benefit. Moreover, that’s one way of dealing with the challenge of a single teacher committed to 30 or more kids. It doesn’t have to be that way. Older kids can be helping younger kids, people from the community can be helping.

Laura Tyson, American business academic

agrees Carbon Tax

Economists across the political spectrum agree that a carbon tax is the most effective way to discourage carbon consumption and lower the risks of catastrophic climate changes.

Andrew Samwick, Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College and the director of the Nelson A. Rockefell Center

agrees Carbon Tax

Scrap CAFE, set a higher gas tax, and return the aggregate revenues from that gas tax through lower income taxes in a progressive fashion.

Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google

agrees Carbon Tax

...there are several good reasons that increasing the gasoline tax in the United States makes economic sense

WiIlliam Nordhaus, Professor of economics at Yale University

agrees Carbon Tax

Actually from an economic point of view, it's a pretty simple problem

George Shultz, American economist, statesman, and businessman

agrees Carbon Tax

There has to be a way to level the playing field and cause those forms of energy to bear their true costs. That means putting a price on carbon.

Charles Murray, Libertarian conservative political scientist, author, and columnist

agrees Basic Income

Replacing the welfare state with an annual grant is the best way to cope with a radically changing U.S. jobs market—and to revitalize America’s civic culture

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate economist based at Columbia University

disagrees Basic Income

You want your government to think more carefully about targeting programmes that help those in need, rather than universal. That’s a trade-off given the budget constraints on the public sector

Andrew Ng, Baidu; Stanford CS faculty; founded Coursera and Google Brain

agrees Timing is key for the launch of new technologies

Need to time technology well: 2007 was good time to launch iPhone; but not 1993 (Apple Newton) since battery/screen/chip tech not there. Extreme example: Leonardo da Vinci (1480s) invention of helicopters was way too early. Engine technology didn’t get there until 1900s. Maybe 2007 was early for autonomous driving (DARPA Urban Challenge) since AI, sensors not yet there. From ~2015 ecosystem more r... See More

Andrew Ng, Baidu; Stanford CS faculty; founded Coursera and Google Brain

agrees Mindset over knowledge to succeed

With so much information now online, a strong work ethic and growth mindset, even more than knowledge, predicts your future success.

Andrew Ng, Baidu; Stanford CS faculty; founded Coursera and Google Brain

agrees The tech world is causing an unprecedent shift in all industries

Tech world is used to tectonic shift every 5 years from new inventions. Now tech has infected other industries so everyone has to shift.

Robert J. Shiller, Professor of economics at Yale and Nobel laureate

agrees Robot Tax

A moderate tax on robots, even a temporary tax that merely slows the adoption of disruptive technology, seems a natural component of a policy to address rising inequality. Revenue could be targeted towards wage insurance, to help people replaced by new technology make the transition to a different career. This would accord with our natural sense of justice, and thus be likely to endure.

Lawrence H. Summers, Harvard economist and former US Treasury secretary

disagrees Robot Tax

First, I cannot see any logic to singling out robots as job destroyers. There are many kinds of innovation that allow the production of more or better output with less labor input. Why pick on robots? Second, much innovative activity, even of a robotlike variety, involves producing better goods and services rather than simply extracting more output from the same input. Third, and perhaps most fund... See More

Andrew Ng, Baidu; Stanford CS faculty; founded Coursera and Google Brain

agrees Transgender individuals in the army

Shameful to discriminate against transgendered individuals in the military. Lets all of us work to help any that're affected find new jobs.

K. Eric Drexler, Founding father of nanotechnology

agrees AI will pose a serious risk to society within the next 50 years

AI technologies may reach thethreshold of rapid, open-ended, recursive improvement before we are prepared to manage the challenges posed by the emergence superintelligent AI agents.

David McAllester, Professor and Chief Academic Officer at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago

agrees AI will pose a serious risk to society within the next 50 years

The Singularity would enable machines to become infinitely intelligent, and would pose an ‘incredibly dangerous scenario’, he says.

Drew Houston,

agrees Everyone should learn how to code

Even if kids want to become a race-car driver, or play baseball, or, you know, build a house -- all of these things have been turned upside down by software

Richard Schmalensee, Professor of Management and Economics at MIT

disagrees $13,000 a year for every over-21-year-old American instead of all transfer payments would be better than the status quo

A properly designed negative income tax could be part of a better policy, but replacing everything is a bad idea.

WiIlliam Nordhaus, Professor of economics at Yale University

disagrees $13,000 a year for every over-21-year-old American instead of all transfer payments would be better than the status quo

And the children get nothing? The basic idea is sound but too simplistic as stated.

Caroline Hoxby, Professor of economics at Stanford University

disagrees $13,000 a year for every over-21-year-old American instead of all transfer payments would be better than the status quo

Even if the $13K # came from coherent theory/evidence (which it does NOT), this ignores all tagging logic of social insurance/optimal tax.

Lawrence Summers, Economist and Harvard University Professor

agrees Carbon Tax

But there should be no doubt that starting from the current zero tax rate on carbon, increased taxation would be desirable

Andrew Ng, Baidu; Stanford CS faculty; founded Coursera and Google Brain

agrees Immigration helps US tech

How many researchers on this list are US immigrants? If not for immigration, the US wouldn't be a leader in AI

Ray Kurzweil, Author, computer scientist, inventor and futurist

agrees AI will pose a serious risk to society within the next 50 years

The existential threat from genetic technologies is already here: the same technology that will soon make major strides against cancer, heart disease, and other diseases could also be employed by a bioterrorist to create a bioengineered biological virus that combines ease of transmission, deadliness, and stealthiness, that is, a long incubation period. The tools and knowledge to do this are far mo... See More

Andrew Ng, Baidu; Stanford CS faculty; founded Coursera and Google Brain

agrees The US should train a million people to do artificial intelligence

US govt should focus on accelerating US AI, rather than trying to slow down anyone else.

David Miliband, Former Labour Foreign Secretary, President & CEO of the International Rescue Committee

disagrees Brexit

Quitting Europe means giving up on our alliances. It means forsaking our position at the negotiating table and abandoning our international responsibilities: unilateral political disarmament.

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