Two hundred economists, sixteen of them Nobel laureates, have signed a statement on AI and the economy. The punchline: the smartest people in the room are telling you they cannot see the road.
Economists do not usually panic in public. This week, more than 200 of them did it together.
On Monday a group of the world’s most decorated economists and AI researchers published a statement called We Must Act Now. It runs to just 88 words. It carries 16 Nobel laureates, the chief economists of both OpenAI and Anthropic, and a supporting cast that includes Eric Schmidt, Reid Hoffman, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun.
The message is blunt. AI “may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years”, the letter says. It could drive “an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame”. That might mean large-scale job losses, or major gains in living standards. The signatories want economists, policymakers and technology leaders to act now and build the guardrails.
The sceptics blinked
