Nobel economists and AI leaders warn: act now or lose control

The polite, hypothetical tone of the statement only makes the names attached to it more jarring. Over 200 economists and AI researchers—including Nobel laureates Daron Acemoglu, Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, and Ben Bernanke—have signed a joint declaration titled “We Must Act Now,” arguing that the window to prepare for AI’s economic shock is dangerously narrow. Coordinated by the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, the document doesn’t mince its framing: the coming transformation could be “larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame.”

Erik Brynjolfsson, who runs the Lab, captured the anxiety driving the effort. “AI capabilities are advancing far faster than our understanding of the economic implications. In that gap lie the greatest opportunities of our era,” he wrote. The statement is loaded with conditional language—AI “may” become radically more capable, it “could” trigger massive job displacement—yet the urgency of the ask is unmistakable. Tom Cunningham of the research group METR put it bluntly: “We are driving in fog, and it is extraordinarily difficult to anticipate what will happen next.”

The call to action lands at an awkward moment for some of the AI industry’s own leaders. Just this past weekend, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he was “pretty sure” AI has been a net job creator so far, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei has described automation as more of a productivity multiplier than a job killer. Their signatures on the document—alongside Google’s Jeff Dean, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, and OpenAI’s Noam Brown—suggest a recognition that the data doesn’t yet back up those rosy assessments. A Federal Reserve Board study found that U.S. programmer job growth nearly halved after ChatGPT launched, with roughly 500,000 fewer jobs than expected over three years. Other research places the start of the job crisis for writers and programmers in early 2022, months before ChatGPT even arrived.

The statement remains conspicuously vague on solutions. No specific policies, no timelines, no institutional blueprints—just a plea for incentives, guardrails, and new institutions. Nobel laureate Michael Spence called for an “all hands on deck” approach, which is less a plan than an admission that no one really knows what comes next. Demis Hassabis, the DeepMind CEO and fellow Nobel winner who didn’t sign the statement, recently compared the arrival of AGI to “10 times the industrial revolution at 10 times the speed.” He thinks that could happen within five years. If he’s right, the fog Cunningham described isn’t lifting anytime soon, and the gap Brynjolfsson warned about is only getting wider.