What makes work invaluable? Michal Masny, the NC Ethics of Technology Postdoctoral Fellow within the MIT Department of Philosophy, investigates the role work plays in our lives and its impact on our well-being.
Masny sees quite a few advantages to work, beyond a paycheck. It’s an area for people to develop excellence at something, make a social contribution, gain social recognition, and create and sustain community.
“Consider a future through which we shorten the work week, or one through which we eliminate work altogether,” Masny says. “I don’t imagine either of those scenarios can be unambiguously good for everybody.”
“Work is each obligatory and positively invaluable,” he argues, further suggesting that our lives is likely to be worsened if we were to eliminate work completely. “There could be optimal mixtures of labor and leisure time.”
Masny is completing his two-year term within the NC Ethics of Technology Fellowship at the tip of the spring semester. Along with advancing his research, Masny has been working to foster dialogue and educate students on issues on the intersection of philosophy and computing. This semester, Masny is teaching an undergraduate course, 24.131 (Ethics of Technology).
Masny advocates for an updated approach to educating complete, socially aware students. “I would like to create scientists who take into consideration their projects and potential outcomes as lawyers and philosophers might, and vice versa,” he says. Masny argues for the importance of eliminating the “wisdom gap” between these groups, citing scientist Carl Sagan’s warning concerning the dangers of becoming “powerful without becoming commensurately clever” as scientific and technological advances proceed.
“The normal division of labor is that scientists and engineers invent latest technologies, after which philosophers and lawyers evaluate and regulate them,” he continues. “However the pace at which latest technologies are invented and deployed has made this division of labor untenable.”
Established in 2021 with support from the NC Cultural Foundation, the fellowship was created with the goal of advancing critical discourse and research within the ethics of technology and AI at MIT, and by making necessary research and knowledge available to the worldwide community.
Enterprise capitalist Songyee Yoon, founder and managing partner of AI-focused investment firm Principal Enterprise Partners and a supporter of the NC Ethics of Technology Fellowship, believes technology and scientific discovery are amongst humanity’s Most worthy public goods, and artificial intelligence represents essentially the most consequential technology of our time.
“If we wish the material of our society to be built responsibly, we must train our builders upstream, on the very moment they start learning to design and scale technology. There is no such thing as a higher place to start this work than MIT,” she says. “Supporting the Ethics of Technology Fellows Program was born from that conviction, and I’m deeply encouraged to see it embraced at MIT.”
“In philosophy, you’re speculated to query every thing”
Masny arrived at MIT in fall 2024, following a yr as a postdoc on the Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public on the University of California at Berkeley. Originally from Poland, Masny received his PhD in philosophy from Princeton University after completing studies at Oxford University and the University of Warwick in the UK.
He works mainly in value theory, ethics of technology, and social and political philosophy. His current research interests include the character of human and animal well-being, our obligations to future generations, the danger of human extinction, the longer term of labor, and anti-aging technology.
During his tenure within the fellowship, Masny has published several research articles on ethical issues regarding the way forward for humanity — a subject closely relevant to serious about the existential risks of AI development and deployment.
“In philosophy, you’re speculated to query every thing,” 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 associate professor within the Program in Science, Technology, and Society.
Through the 2024-25 academic yr, Masny led a student research group, “Deepfakes: Ethical, Political, and Epistemological Issues,” as a component of the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) Scholars Program. The group explored the moral, political, and epistemological dimensions of concerns over misleading deepfakes, and the way they could be mitigated.
Students in Masny’s cohort spent spring 2025 working in small groups on quite a few projects and presented their findings in a poster session through the MIT Ethics of Computing Research Symposium on the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.
In summer 2025, Masny assisted with a summer course in philosophy, 24.133/134 (Experiential Ethics), through which students subject their computer science and engineering projects to moral scrutiny with the assistance of trained philosophers.
He’s encouraged by the opportunities to check his ideas and share them with individuals who can assist refine and improve them.
Communities of practice and engagement
When considering the worth of his experience at MIT, Masny lauds the philosophy department and the opportunities to collaborate with so many various kinds of students. To reply the sorts of questions his research uncovers, he says, you will need to range further afield. He values the space MIT creates for broad inquiry while also searching for connections between his findings on work, its value, and the human impact of technology on our social lives.
“Typically, undergraduate philosophy courses include two hour-long lectures followed by discussion; a lecture is like an audiobook,” he says. As an alternative, he believes, they need to more like listening to a podcast or watching a chat show.
“I would like the category to be an event in a student’s schedule,” he continues.
Masny can be considering methods to integrate invaluable philosophical tools into life outside the classroom. Philosophy and research can support other forms of inquiry. Developing philosophers’ mindsets is a net positive, by his reckoning. Designing higher questions, for instance, can lead to raised, more insightful, more accurate answers. It could actually also improve students’ abilities to discover challenges.
Masny will begin teaching on the University of Colorado at Boulder in fall 2026, and desires to check latest ideas while continuing his research into the worth of labor.
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 series of outstanding young philosophers working on the intersection of ethics and AI, studying the systemic effects of latest computing technologies and the moral, social, and political challenges they pose.
“That is just the form of applied interdisciplinary pondering we want to support and sustain at MIT,” he adds.