Hundreds of experts call for urgent action to tackle AI's economic impact

AI acts as a massive demand-and-supply shock that is accelerating economic output.

The economic impact of AI centers on unprecedented productivity growth, a massive restructuring of the global labor market, and a projected multi-trillion-dollar boost to global GDP.

Nobel laureates and leading tech experts:

In a major joint statement, more than 200 leading researchers and economists including 15 Nobel laureates and top scientists from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic have issued an urgent call for governments to build policies and institutions capable of handling the massive economic disruption caused by Artificial Intelligence.

Its signatories include OpenAI finance chief Sarah Friar, Google DeepMind Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark and people on the economics research team at the Claude chatbot maker.

Nobel laureates Michael Spence, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, among others, also signed the statement.

The statement has called for deeper research on AI's economic impacts and to start building policies and institutions required to ensure the technology benefits society and to navigate risks such as large-scale job displacement.

"Steam, electricity, and computers each gave societies decades to adapt. AI may give us ‌only a few years," said Anton Korinek, professor at the University of Virginia.

"We cannot improvise our strategy and institutions in the middle of the transformation; waiting for certainty means arriving too late."

Korinek, who joined Anthropic's economic research team in March, organized the initiative with fellow economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Ajay Agrawal and Tom Cunningham.

The experts urged governments and businesses to adopt policies that address AI's growing impact on jobs, productivity, and economic inequality.

The initiative, organized by prominent economists like Anton Korinek and Erik Brynjolfsson, warns that while AI will trigger a shift larger than the Industrial Revolution, the timeline for society to adapt will be dangerously compressed.

Historical breakthroughs like steam, electricity, and early computing gave societies decades to slowly adapt their labor laws and economies. Experts warn that AI may only give us a few years.

As Anton Korinek puts it: "Waiting for certainty means arriving too late.

Unlike previous technological shifts that primarily automated manual labor, AI is rapidly transforming cognitive, creative, and administrative tasks, threatening sudden, large-scale white-collar and blue-collar job vulnerability simultaneously.

Notably, a stark divide exists between rapid technological advancement and lagging economic policy. 

Without immediate government steering, the wealth and productivity gains of AI risk being hyper-concentrated within a handful of massive tech firms, worsening global and domestic economic divides.