Lifted in toto from the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, July 13:
New statement warns that AI could drive an economic transformation larger than the Industrial Revolution — on a vastly shorter timeline — and urges economists, policymakers, and technology leaders to prepare.
Today, a group of leading economists and AI researchers, including sixteen Nobel Laureates, released “We Must Act Now: A Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy,” calling for urgent preparation for the economic impacts of radically more powerful AI.
The statement, organized by economists
Erik Brynjolfsson, Ajay Agrawal, Anton Korinek, and Tom Cunningham,
warns that increasingly capable AI systems could reshape the economy at
unprecedented speed. While AI offers enormous opportunities to improve
productivity and living standards, it also raises important questions
for workers, firms, and public institutions.
The statement calls on economists, policymakers, and technology leaders to deepen research on AI’s
economic impacts and to begin building the policies and institutions
needed to ensure AI complements human capabilities and benefits society.
“AI capabilities
are advancing far faster than our understanding of the economic
implications. In that gap lie the greatest opportunities of our era. We
must act now to guide AI to complement humans rather than simply imitate
them — and to generate prosperity for the many, not just the few,” said
Erik Brynjolfsson, the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor at
Stanford University and Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab.
“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 Michael Spence, Nobel Laureate and Professor Emeritus at New York University.
“I’m
so happy to join other leading experts in calling for the urgent need
to redirect AI so that its risks are minimized and it can work for the
benefit of workers and society,” said Daron Acemoglu, Nobel Laureate and Institute Professor at MIT.
“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, Professor at the University of Virginia, currently on leave at Anthropic.
“Whether rapidly
advancing AI broadly elevates global living standards or severely
concentrates wealth is not predetermined; it depends on how we choose to
re-architect our political and economic systems today. We cannot afford
to wait for the full transformation to arrive and in the meantime rely
on institutional scaffolding that was optimized for a
pre-high-fidelity-prediction world,” said Ajay Agrawal, Professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.
“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.” said Tom Cunningham, Researcher at METR.
The statement has been signed by more
than 200 economists and AI researchers from leading universities and AI
research organizations around the world. The full statement and the
current list of signatories are available at http://wemustactnow.ai/.
As with most of these things, climate, nuclear energy etc. the important/valuable information is not how many people sign something, that's just politics, but rather which of the signers has the most accurate intuition/insight into what is coming.
And that, unlike the political aspect, takes some effort to glean from the mass of names.
