Nobel laureates among more than 200 experts urging action on AI's economic impact

More than 200 researchers and economists, including ​15 Nobel laureates and ​researchers at OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, ​have called for governments and technology leaders to urgently create policies and institutions to address the economic impact of AI.

They issued ‌the jointly ⁠signed ⁠statement on Monday, warning that AI could drive a larger ​economic transformation than the Industrial Revolution but one that is "vastly ​shorter" in time frame, raising questions for workers, companies and public institutions.

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.

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.