More than 200 top economists, executives, and researchers — including over a dozen Nobel Prize winners — have signed a letter warning about AI’s potential threat to jobs.
The 88-word-long letter, titled “We Must Act Now,” says that AI could become “radically more powerful” in the coming decade, and argues that policymakers worldwide need to do more to build guardrails for the technology or risk “large-scale job displacement.”
Signatories include former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, and Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz, Daron Acemoglu, and Simon Johnson.
Google AI lead Jeff Dean, Anthropic cofounder Jack Clark, and OpenAI finance boss Sarah Friar also signed.
Read the full text of the letter, organized by the Stanford Digital Economy Lab and subtitled “A Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy,” here:
- AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years.
- This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame. It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards.
- Economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI and to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.
