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

The OpenAI logo is displayed on a cellphone with an image on a computer monitor generated by ChatGPT's Dall-E text-to-image model, Dec. 8, 2023, in Boston. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File)

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.

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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.

(Reporting by Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Editing by Leroy Leo)