200 economists say AI threatens jobs but no one has a plan to fix it
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A letter penned by close to 200 economists, academics, and tech executives this week has warned that artificial intelligence has the power to disrupt the world economy faster than any previous technology. Unfortunately, it did not come with a solution. The letter, entitled “We Must Act Now,” was issued Monday, and stated that “AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years,” presenting risks ranging from job loss at scale to opportunities in improving quality of life. Organized by Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson, the list includes 15 Nobel laureates, as well as the chief economists of OpenAI and Anthropic, Anthropic founder Jack Clark, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla.
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What is interesting about the letter is not so much what it says. Tech leaders have been warning about job losses because of AI for some time now. What matters is who else signed the letter. The names of Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, the MIT economists who won the 2024 Nobel in economics, are interesting here.
“There’s been a notable change in the profession,” Brynjolfsson said. “I still see a big gap there, a big mismatch, and I’m kind of worried that we’re not going to be ready for the tsunami that’s coming.”
But Acemoglu sticks to his guns when it comes to the timing. While saying that he is still skeptical about AI proving to be revolutionary as soon as Silicon Valley claims it will be, he admits that recent achievements of technology made him worried about job losses. “If you look at what robots did in the manufacturing sector, if AI does something equivalent in a more compressed time period, that would be really disruptive, really costly for people’s livelihoods,” he said.
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You know what the actually issue is? The letter is asking the economists, government officials, and business representatives to “act now to understand the economics of transformative AI” and guide it towards complementing human workers. That’s all. No policy prescriptions. No estimates of how many jobs could be lost or within what time horizon. No suggestions on how to address the flaws of unemployment insurance and other social safety net programs, which economists know are ill-prepared for a wave of white-collar layoffs.
According to Brynjolfsson, the top priority in the field at the moment is developing instruments for measuring the impact of artificial intelligence in the economy since there is no data available. Currently, various ways of measuring it yield totally different conclusions about one simple question: does AI take jobs right now, or not?
That’s the real headline hiding under this one. It isn’t that 200 credentialed people are worried about AI. It’s that the people whose job is to have answers are, for now, just as unprepared as everyone else, and are saying so publicly for the first time.
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