David Rotman

MIT economist David Autor first documented the loss of millions of jobs to Chinese imports a decade ago. Now he sees an even more serious  danger if the US loses the race for advanced manufacturing.

AI data centers are driving a surge in new natural-gas power plants around the country. What does that mean for our clean-energy aspirations?

They won’t bring back manufacturing, and they could stunt our ability to make tomorrow's breakthroughs.

Sure, there's too much red tape, but there is another reason building anything is so expensive: the construction industry's "awful" productivity.

Watch the on-demand video of the Roundtables session, Putting AI’s Climate Impact Into Perspective. Available only to MIT Alumni and subscribers. Featured speakers are David Rotman, Editor-at-large, Melissa Heikkilä, Senior AI Reporter, and James Temple, Sr Editor for Energy.

Artificial intelligence could put us on the path to a booming economic future, but getting there will take some serious course corrections.

Watch the ondemand video of the Roundtables session: Building a Cleaner Future: Better Batteries and Their Materials. Available only to MIT Alumni and subscribers. Hosted by Casey Crownhart, Climate reporter, David Rotman, Editor at large, James Temple, Sr Editor of Climate & Energy. Learn more about what battery technologies will matter, how we will build them, and the community impacts.

In a 1938 article, MIT’s president argued that technical progress didn’t mean fewer jobs. He’s still right.

Turning advances in clean energy and carbon-free industrial processes into sustainable businesses is expensive and risky. But we can learn from past failures.

A decade after the high profile bust of cleantech 1.0, venture-backed firms are again flourishing. We need them to succeed. Will they?

Can a massive infusion of money for making computer chips transform the economy of Syracuse and show us how to rebuild the nation’s industrial base?

New large language models will transform many jobs. Whether they will lead to widespread prosperity or not is up to us.

Three bills investing hundreds of billions into technological development could change the way we think about government’s role in growing prosperity.

New digital technologies are exacerbating inequality. Here’s how scientists creating AI can make better choices.

Azeem Azhar’s new book “Exponential Age” predicts stupendous technology growth will lead to an age of abundance. The reality is more complicated.

In nanotechnology and molecular biology, researchers are often severely limited by the inability to observe atoms and molecules in three dimensions. Proteins, for instance, fold into complex patterns that are largely invisible to the biologists trying to work out their functions of the biomolecules.…

In 2001, we picked our first annual set of 10 breakthrough technologies. Here’s what their fates tell us about progress over the last two decades.

The failure of capitalism to solve our biggest problems is prompting many to question one of its basic precepts.

America’s paralysis reveals a deep and fundamental flaw in how the nation thinks about innovation.

The pandemic shows that the US is no longer much good at coming up with technologies relevant to our most basic needs.