Neil Thompson

Confidence 0.75 · 2 sources · last confirmed 2026-07-14

Director of the MIT FutureTech research project, cross-appointed at MIT’s Computer Science and AI Laboratory (CSAIL) and MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. FutureTech studies the economic and technical foundations of progress in computing. Previously Assistant Professor of Innovation and Strategy at MIT Sloan (co-directed the Experimental Innovation Lab / X-Lab) and Visiting Professor at Harvard’s Laboratory for Innovation Science. PhD in Business and Public Policy (Berkeley, with Masters in Computer Science and Statistics); Masters in Economics (LSE); undergraduate degrees in Physics and International Development. Prior to academia: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Bain & Company, the United Nations, the World Bank, the Canadian Parliament.

Surfaces in this wiki as co-author (with David Autor) of the expertise framework — a theoretical model of occupational task bundling and expertise hierarchy explaining why automation simultaneously raises wages in some occupations and lowers them in others, depending on whether the automated tasks were relatively expert or inexpert within the occupation’s task bundle.

Appears in this wiki via

• 2025-06-01-autor-thompson-expertise — co-author (with David Autor) of the NBER working paper and its underlying Schumpeter Lecture (EEA, Rotterdam, August 2024); the primary academic statement of the expertise framework.
• 2026-07-10-thompson-tedxboston-how-ai-will-reshape-jobs — sole speaker; TEDxBoston popularization of the expertise framework, adding forward-looking LLM task-evaluation data (from Thompson’s FutureTech lab) projecting AI-driven expertise change across occupations.

Open questions

• The underlying dataset/working paper for the TEDx talk’s LLM task-evaluation study (BLS task database benchmarked against current models) is not yet a separate wiki source — worth tracking down as a future ingest target if Thompson’s lab publishes it.
• David Autor (co-author) is currently a dangling single-source mention on 2025-06-01-autor-thompson-expertise — promote to an entity page on a second-source citation.