What makes work worthwhile? Michal Masny, the NC Ethics of Technology Postdoctoral Fellow within the MIT Department of Philosophy, investigates the function work performs in our lives and its affect on our well-being.
Masny sees quite a few advantages to work, past a paycheck. It’s an area for individuals to develop excellence at one thing, make a social contribution, acquire social recognition, and create and maintain group.
“Consider a future in which we shorten the work week, or one in which we eliminate work altogether,” Masny says. “I don’t believe either of these scenarios would be unambiguously good for everyone.”
“Work is both necessary and positively valuable,” he argues, additional suggesting that our lives is perhaps worsened if we have been to get rid of work utterly. “There can be optimal combinations of work and leisure time.”
Masny is finishing his two-year time period within the NC Ethics of Technology Fellowship on the finish of the spring semester. In addition to advancing his analysis, Masny has been working to foster dialogue and educate college students on points on the intersection of philosophy and computing. This semester, Masny is educating an undergraduate course, 24.131 (Ethics of Technology).
Masny advocates for an up to date method to educating full, socially conscious college students. “I want to create scientists who think about their projects and potential outcomes as lawyers and philosophers might, and vice versa,” he says. Masny argues for the significance of eliminating the “wisdom gap” between these teams, citing scientist Carl Sagan’s warning concerning the risks of turning into “powerful without becoming commensurately wise” as scientific and technological advances proceed.
“The traditional division of labor is that scientists and engineers invent new technologies, and then philosophers and lawyers evaluate and regulate them,” he continues. “But the pace at which new technologies are invented and deployed has made this division of labor untenable.”
Established in 2021 with help from the NC Cultural Foundation, the fellowship was created with the aim of advancing important discourse and analysis within the ethics of expertise and AI at MIT, and by making vital analysis and data out there to the worldwide group.
Venture capitalist Songyee Yoon, founder and managing accomplice of AI-focused funding agency Principal Venture Partners and a supporter of the NC Ethics of Technology Fellowship, believes expertise and scientific discovery are amongst humanity’s most precious public items, and synthetic intelligence represents probably the most consequential expertise of our time.
“If we want the fabric of our society to be built responsibly, we must train our builders upstream, at the very moment they begin learning to design and scale technology. There is no better place to begin this work than MIT,” she says. “Supporting the Ethics of Technology Fellows Program was born from that conviction, and I am deeply encouraged to see it embraced at MIT.”
“In philosophy, you’re supposed to question everything”
Masny arrived at MIT in fall 2024, following a 12 months as a postdoc on the Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public on the University of California at Berkeley. Originally from Poland, Masny obtained his PhD in philosophy from Princeton University after finishing research at Oxford University and the University of Warwick within the United Kingdom.
He works primarily in worth principle, ethics of expertise, and social and political philosophy. His present analysis pursuits embody the character of human and animal well-being, our obligations to future generations, the danger of human extinction, the longer term of work, and anti-aging expertise.
During his tenure within the fellowship, Masny has printed a number of analysis articles on moral points in regards to the future of humanity — a subject intently related to excited about the existential dangers of AI improvement and deployment.
“In philosophy, you’re supposed to question everything,” he says.
Masny’s work within the fellowship continues a practice of collaborative investigation and exploration that MIT encourages and celebrates. In fall 2024, Masny co-taught an introductory undergraduate course, STS.006J/24.06J (Bioethics), with Robin Scheffler, an affiliate professor within the Program in Science, Technology, and Society.
During the 2024-25 tutorial 12 months, Masny led a scholar analysis group, “Deepfakes: Ethical, Political, and Epistemological Issues,” as an element of the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) Scholars Program. The group explored the moral, political, and epistemological dimensions of issues over deceptive deepfakes, and the way they are often mitigated.
Students in Masny’s cohort spent spring 2025 working in small teams on a quantity of tasks and introduced their findings in a poster session in the course of the MIT Ethics of Computing Research Symposium on the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.
In summer time 2025, Masny assisted with a summer time course in philosophy, 24.133/134 (Experiential Ethics), during which college students topic their laptop science and engineering tasks to moral scrutiny with the assistance of skilled philosophers.
He’s inspired by the alternatives to check his concepts and share them with individuals who may help refine and enhance them.
Communities of observe and engagement
When contemplating the worth of his expertise at MIT, Masny lauds the philosophy division and the alternatives to collaborate with so many alternative sorts of students. To reply the sorts of questions his analysis uncovers, he says, you could vary additional afield. He values the area MIT creates for broad inquiry whereas additionally searching for connections between his findings on work, its worth, and the human affect of expertise on our social lives.
“Typically, undergraduate philosophy courses include two hour-long lectures followed by discussion; a lecture is like an audiobook,” he says. Instead, he believes, they need to extra like listening to a podcast or watching a chat present.
“I want the class to be an event in a student’s schedule,” he continues.
Masny can also be contemplating combine worthwhile philosophical instruments into life exterior the classroom. Philosophy and analysis can help different kinds of inquiry. Developing philosophers’ mindsets is a internet constructive, by his reckoning. Designing higher questions, for instance, can result in higher, extra insightful, extra correct solutions. It can even enhance college students’ talents to establish challenges.
Masny will start educating on the University of Colorado at Boulder in fall 2026, and needs to check new concepts whereas persevering with his analysis into the worth of work.
Kieran Setiya, the Peter de Florez Professor in Philosophy and head of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, says the NC Ethics of Technology Postdoctoral Fellowship has allowed MIT to usher in a collection of distinctive younger philosophers working on the intersection of ethics and AI, learning the systemic results of new computing applied sciences and the ethical, social, and political challenges they pose.
“This is just the kind of applied interdisciplinary thinking we need to support and sustain at MIT,” he provides.