200+ economists say ‘we must act now’ on AI’s economic impact and job displacement risks

‘AI may give us only a few years’

Computer scientist and AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio was among the signatories and said in a separate statement that based on the trajectory of AI development, “it is highly plausible that AI will drastically transform our economies.”

“We must be intentional and make collective, democratic choices, rather than letting market forces play out and risking leaving most citizens behind,” wrote Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal.

“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, a professor at the University of Virginia, currently on leave at Anthropic.

Tom Cunningham, researcher at METR, who has also signed the letter said: “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.”

Nobel Laureate Michael Spence called for an “all hands on deck” approach to guide the technology beneficially.

” 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 Spence, a professor emeritus at New York University.