Kevin T. Dugan and Justin Lahart:
Aidan Toner-Rodgers, 27, sprang to the upper tiers of economics as a graduate student late last year from virtually out of nowhere.
While still taking core classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he wrote a paper on artificial intelligence’s workplace impact so rapidly influential it was cited in Congress. He appeared in the pages of The Wall Street Journal in December as the very picture of a wunderkind, in faded jeans with tousled hair, in between two of his mentors, including Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu. Toner-Rodgers’s work offered a surprising and even hopeful revelation about our high-tech future. He concluded that AI increased worker productivity and spurred innovation. Also, people didn’t like using it very much.
Within weeks, those mentors were asking an unthinkable question: Had Toner-Rodgers made it all up?
By the spring, Toner-Rodgers was no longer enrolled at MIT. The university disavowed his paper. Questions multiplied, but one seemed more elusive than the rest: How did a baby-faced novice from small-town California dupe some of academia’s brightest minds?
“There is no world where this makes any sense,” said David Autor, one of the MIT professors who had previously championed his student’s research. MIT, Autor and Acemoglu declined to comment on the specifics of the investigation into the research, citing privacy constraints.