My sense is that many economists are optimistic about the long term development of A.I., while being cautious about some of the shorter term transitions that it will initiate. (This is a different set of worries than the species-extinguishing fears that can also be heard.)
Yesterday an open letter was published, signed by many economists:
We Must Act Now: A Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy
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.
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Here's the coverage from Stanford:
"STANFORD, Calif. –
July 13, 2026 – Today, a group of leading economists and AI researchers,
including sixteen Nobel Laureates, released “We Must Act Now: A
Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy,” calling for urgent
preparation for the economic impacts of radically more powerful AI.
The
statement, organized by economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Ajay Agrawal,
Anton Korinek, and Tom Cunningham, warns that increasingly capable AI
systems could reshape the economy at unprecedented speed. While AI
offers enormous opportunities to improve productivity and living
standards, it also raises important questions for workers, firms, and
public institutions.
The statement calls on economists,
policymakers, and technology leaders to deepen research on AI’s economic
impacts and to begin building the policies and institutions needed to
ensure AI complements human capabilities and benefits society.
“AI
capabilities are advancing far faster than our understanding of the
economic implications. In that gap lie the greatest opportunities of our
era. We must act now to guide AI to complement humans rather than
simply imitate them — and to generate prosperity for the many, not just
the few,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki
Professor at Stanford University and Director of the Stanford Digital
Economy Lab.
“The scale, scope, and speed of the advances in AI,
combined with a high level of uncertainty about the magnitude and timing
of the impacts across many parts of the economy, call for an ‘all hands
on deck’ approach to steering AI in beneficial directions,” said
Michael Spence, Nobel Laureate and Professor Emeritus at New York
University.
“I’m so happy to join other leading experts in
calling for the urgent need to redirect AI so that its risks are
minimized and it can work for the benefit of workers and society,” said
Daron Acemoglu, Nobel Laureate and Institute Professor at MIT.
“Steam,
electricity, and computers each gave societies decades to adapt; AI may
give us only a few years. We cannot improvise our strategy and
institutions in the middle of the transformation; waiting for certainty
means arriving too late,” said Anton Korinek, Professor at the
University of Virginia, currently on leave at Anthropic.
“Whether
rapidly advancing AI broadly elevates global living standards or
severely concentrates wealth is not predetermined; it depends on how we
choose to re-architect our political and economic systems today. We
cannot afford to wait for the full transformation to arrive and in the
meantime rely on institutional scaffolding that was optimized for a
pre-high-fidelity-prediction world,” said Ajay Agrawal, Professor at the
University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.
“We are
driving in the fog, and it is extraordinarily difficult to anticipate
what will happen next. It’s the right time for a coordinated effort to
bring clarity to a confusing situation.” said Tom Cunningham, Researcher
at METR.
The statement has been signed by more than 200
economists and AI researchers from leading universities and AI research
organizations around the world. The full statement and the current list
of signatories are available at http://wemustactnow.ai/."
##############
Here's the story in the NYT:
"“A.I. may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years,” the researchers wrote in a statement released on Monday, adding that the technology “could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards.”
"The statement, titled “We Must Act Now,” was signed by nearly 200 people, including 15 Nobel laureates and the chief economists of two of the leading A.I. labs, Open AI and Anthropic. Other notable signatories include Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic; Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google; and Vinod Khosla, a prominent venture capitalist."
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And here's an edited version of the letter, that I also like. (Inevitably, when you're asked to sign open letters, they don't read exactly as you would have written them yourself. (Even if you are one of the main authors of an open letter, it may reflect compromises that were required to reach consensus among your constituency.)
Why I Didn't Sign the AI Open Letter: Instead, I edited it. by Andrew McAfee
Here's his version (the big change is in item 3; his explanation is at the link):
1. AI is likely to become radically more powerful over the next 10 years.
2. Like previous world-changing technologies, AI will bring major gains in living standards. But it will also bring new risks, harms, and disruptions. And because of its extraordinarily fast improvement, AI’s benefits and shocks might come quickly.
3. So economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI, and to build the capabilities needed to respond quickly and effectively to the challenges it will bring.
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