A new statement signed by 16 Nobel laureates marks a shift among economists who once greeted such warnings with skepticism
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More than 200 economists and researchers, including 16 Nobel laureates, released a joint statement on Monday warning that artificial intelligence could reshape the economy at a speed and scale exceeding the Industrial Revolution, and calling on policymakers and technology leaders to begin building policies and institutions to address the disruption.
The statement, titled "We Must Act Now," warns that AI "could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards." Among its core demands, the statement urges economists, policymakers, and technology leaders to expand their understanding of how AI is reshaping the economy and to develop guardrails ensuring the technology augments rather than displaces human workers.
The statement's significance lies partly in who signed it. Erik Brynjolfsson, a Stanford economist who helped organize the effort, said there has been "a notable change in the profession," according to The New York Times. The economics profession has long pushed back on warnings of swift AI-driven displacement, with most researchers arguing that the timeline for technological disruption is routinely overstated. Among those who put their names to the document are Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson — both MIT professors and 2024 Nobel economics laureates — whose earlier public skepticism about AI's disruptive potential made their participation particularly striking, according to the Times.
"If you look at what robots did in the manufacturing sector, if AI does something equivalent in a more compressed time period, that would be really disruptive, really costly for people's livelihoods," Daron Acemoglu said, according to the Times. At the same time, Acemoglu cautioned that he has not abandoned his doubts about whether AI will move as fast as the industry's most optimistic voices claim, even as a string of recent breakthroughs has sharpened his worry about workers being pushed out of jobs.
Anton Korinek, a University of Virginia professor currently embedded with Anthropic, framed the urgency in historical terms: "Steam, electricity, and computers each gave societies decades to adapt; AI may give us only a few years." Korinek co-organized the effort with Stanford's Erik Brynjolfsson, Ajay Agrawal of the University of Toronto, and METR researcher Tom Cunningham.
Industry representation on the signatory list is notable, with Reuters reporting that it includes Sarah Friar, who serves as OpenAI's finance chief, Jeff Dean of Google $GOOGL DeepMind, and Jack Clark, one of Anthropic's founding figures. The statement does not include specific policy recommendations.
Getting a clearer statistical picture of how AI is moving through the economy ranks among the most urgent tasks facing the field, Brynjolfsson told the Times, pointing to years of contradictory measurements that have left researchers struggling to assess who is most at risk. "I still see a big gap there, a big mismatch, and I'm kind of worried that we're not going to be ready for the tsunami that's coming," he said.
The statement arrives as white-collar payrolls have contracted for dozens of consecutive months, a stretch that Aaron Terrazas, a former chief economist at Glassdoor, has called without precedent outside of a recession. The headline unemployment rate has remained steady, but labor market researchers have noted that slack is appearing as underemployment and workforce exits rather than formal unemployment.
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