Nobel Laureates and Top Economists Sign Statement Urging Action on AI's Economic Transformation
soumitrashukla9 · x · 2026-08-20
MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson shared the "We Must Act Now" statement while pushing back on The Economist's coverage of Daron Acemoglu—acknowledging their well-known disagreements over the magnitude of AI's productivity effects, but vouching for Acemoglu's intellect and integrity with three personal anecdotes.
The statement is signed by dozens of leading economists and tech figures, including numerous Nobel laureates (Acemoglu, Stiglitz, Krugman, Bernanke, Akerlof, Milgrom, Roth, Hart, and more) plus Eric Schmidt, Yoshua Bengio, and Dan Hendrycks. Its core argument: AI may become radically more powerful over the next decade, driving an economic transformation larger than the Industrial Revolution but unfolding far faster—bringing risks of large-scale job displacement alongside major living-standard gains. Economists, policymakers, and tech leaders must act now to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI toward complementing humans.
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