What makes work valuable? Michal Masny, NC Ethics of Technology postdoctoral fellow in the MIT Philosophy Department, examines the role of work in our lives and its impact on our well-being.
Masney sees many benefits to working beyond the paycheck. It is a place for people to develop excellence in something, make social contributions, gain social recognition, and create and maintain community.
“Consider a future in which we shorten the work week, or consider a future in which we eliminate work altogether,” Masny says. “I don’t think any of these scenarios will certainly be good for everyone.”
“Work is both necessary and positively valued,” he argues, further suggesting that our lives could deteriorate if we eliminated work altogether. “There may be an optimal combination of work and leisure time.”
Masney is completing his two-year term on the NC Ethics of Technology Fellowship at the end of the spring semester. In addition to pursuing his research, Masny is working to foster dialogue and educate students on issues at the intersection of philosophy and computing. This semester, Masny is teaching an undergraduate course, 24.131 (Ethics of Technology).
Masney advocates an updated approach to educating well-rounded, socially conscious students. “I want to create scientists who think like lawyers and philosophers about their projects and potential outcomes, and vice versa,” he says. Masny argues the importance of closing the “knowledge gap” between these groups, citing scientist Carl Sagan’s warning about the dangers of becoming “comparably intelligent without becoming powerful” as scientific and technological progress continues.
“The traditional division of labor is that scientists and engineers invent new technologies, and then philosophers and lawyers evaluate and regulate them,” he adds. “But the speed at which new technologies have been 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 in the ethics of technology and AI at MIT, and making critical research and information available to the global community.
Venture capitalist Songyi Yoon, founder and managing partner of AI-focused investment firm Principal Venture Partners and supporter of the NC Ethics of Technology Fellowship, believes that technology and scientific discovery are among humanity’s most valuable public goods, and artificial intelligence represents the most consequential technology of our time.
“If we want the infrastructure of our society to be built responsibly, we need to train our builders upstream, right as they begin to learn design and scale technology. There is no better place to start this work than MIT,” she says. “Supporting the ethics of the Technology Fellows program was born out of that conviction, and I am very encouraged to see it being adopted at MIT.”
“In philosophy, you must question everything.”
Masny arrived at MIT in autumn 2024, after a year as a postdoc at the Kavli Center for Ethics, Science and the Public at the University of California at Berkeley. Masny, originally from Poland, received a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University after completing studies at the University of Oxford and the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom.
He works primarily in value theory, ethics of technology, and social and political philosophy. His current research interests include the nature of human and animal welfare, our responsibilities to future generations, human extinction risk, the future of work, and aging technologies.
During his tenure at the fellowship, Masny has published several research articles on ethical issues related to the future of humanity – a topic that is highly relevant to thinking about the existential risks of AI development and deployment.
“In philosophy, you have to question everything,” he says.
Masney’s work in the fellowship continues the tradition of collaborative inquiry and exploration that MIT encourages and celebrates. In the fall of 2024, Masny co-taught an introductory graduate course, STS.006J/24.06J (Bioethics), with Robin Scheffler, associate professor in the Science, Technology, and Society program.
During the 2024–25 academic year, Masny led a student research group, “Deepfakes: Ethical, Political, and Epistemological Issues”, as part of the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) Scholars Program. The group explored the ethical, political, and epistemological dimensions of concerns over deceptive deepfakes and how they can be mitigated.
Students in Masny’s group spent the spring of 2025 working in small groups on several projects and presented their findings in a poster session during the MIT Ethics of Computing Research Symposium at the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.
In the summer of 2025, Masny facilitated a summer course in philosophy, 24.133/134 (Experiential Ethics), in which students subject their computer science and engineering projects to ethical scrutiny with the help of trained philosophers.
They are encouraged by opportunities to test their ideas and share them with people who can help refine and improve them.
Communities of Practice and Engagement
When considering the value of his experience at MIT, Masny appreciates the philosophy department and the opportunities he had to collaborate with many different types of scholars. He says that to answer the kind of questions that have come up in his research, you will have to go further. He values the space created by MIT for broader inquiry, while also exploring the connections between his findings at work, its value, and the human impact of technology on our social lives.
“Typically, undergraduate philosophy courses consist of two-hour-long lectures followed by discussion; a lecture is like an audiobook,” he says. They believe that instead, they should be more likely to listen to podcasts or watch talk shows.
“I want the class to be an event in a student’s schedule,” he adds.
Masny is also considering how to integrate valuable philosophical tools into life outside the classroom. Philosophy and research can support other types of investigation. According to him, developing the mindset of philosophers is absolutely positive. For example, designing better questions can lead to better, more insightful, more accurate answers. It can also improve students’ abilities to identify challenges.
Masney will begin teaching at the University of Colorado at Boulder in the fall of 2026, and wants to test new ideas while continuing his research on the value of work.
Kieran Setia, 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 bring together a range of extraordinary young philosophers working at the intersection of ethics and AI, studying the systemic impacts of new computing technologies and the ethical, social and political challenges they pose.
He added, “This is the kind of applied interdisciplinary thinking that we need to support and sustain at MIT.”
