It’s become a trope in Silicon Valley to liken the rise of AI to the Industrial Revolution. Hardcore AI true-believers often say that the rise of intelligent machines will not only make humanity more productive than ever before—far surpassing the productivity gains caused by the invention of the steam engine—but also allow us to solve our most existentially challenging problems. That rosy view of the future usually neglects to mention, however, that the Industrial Revolution metaphor has a dark side. For while the locomotive and the factory did usher in a new age of material wealth, they also led to the rise of new problems that plague us to this day: sharpening wealth disparities, mechanized warfare, and an atmosphere choked with carbon, just to name a few. In an open letter published on Monday, a group of high-profile economists and AI experts are warning that society needs to learn this historical lesson, or suffer the consequences. Radical change, quickly Unambiguously titled “We Must Act Now,” the letter as of Monday morning had received close to two hundred signatures, including those of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Anthropic cofounder Jack Clark, OpenAI cofounder Wojciech Zaremba, and Yoshua Bengio, a Turing Award winner and one of the so-called “Godfathers of AI.” It’s meant to be a brief and direct warning (it clocks in at fewer than one hundred words) that the economic and social impacts of AI may indeed mark a major historical shift, but that the danger lies in the fact that these will unfold at a speed unlike anything ever seen before in history.