Calls grow for controls amid rapid AI pace

More than 200 technology experts and economists have signed a statement warning that AI could rapidly reshape the global economy, urging policymakers to take its disruptive potential more seriously.

Released on Monday, the statement aims to prompt economists and policymakers to better prepare for AI-driven economic upheaval, said Erik Brynjolfsson, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI who helped organize the initiative.

"There's been a notable change in the profession," he said. "I still see a big gap there, a big mismatch, and I'm worried that we're not going to be ready for the tsunami that's coming."

Along with many other economists, Brynjolfsson believes AI will ultimately boost living standards, much as the Industrial Revolution and computing did. However, he warned that AI's impact is likely to unfold much faster, potentially causing sharper economic disruption.

The statement makes three points. First, AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years.

Second, its impact on the economy could exceed that of the Industrial Revolution while unfolding over a far shorter period, bringing both risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities, such as major gains in living standards.

Third, economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to "build the incentives, guardrails and institutions needed to ensure AI complements humans and benefits society".

The signatories include more than a dozen Nobel laureates, the chief economists of OpenAI and Anthropic, Anthropic cofounder Jack Clark, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

"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," said Daron Acemoglu, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in economics.

Digital marketing and recruitment services company Clickvision, citing multiple studies, said AI could displace 85 million to 92 million jobs globally by 2030 while creating 97 million to 170 million new ones.

It estimated that AI could automate at least part of 30 percent of jobs in the United States by 2030, while 60 percent would undergo "significant task-level changes". It said that 11.7 percent of US jobs could already be automated today and that 14 percent of the global workforce may be forced to change careers by 2030.

Market intelligence and research platform DataRefs said the industries most vulnerable to AI include manufacturing, customer service, transportation and retail. It also identified interpreters, translators and historians as facing a high risk of dislocation because tools such as ChatGPT, DeepL and Google Translate can perform many of their tasks.

Younger workers and advanced economies that have already integrated technology will be more highly affected, it said.

"Steam, electricity and computers each gave societies decades to adapt; AI may give us only a few years," Anton Korinek, a professor at the University of Virginia, said in a statement. "We cannot improvise our strategy and institutions in the middle of the transformation; waiting for certainty means arriving too late."

AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal who also signed the statement, said it is "highly plausible that AI will drastically transform our economies" based on the technology's current trajectory.

"We must be intentional and make collective, democratic choices, rather than letting market forces play out and risking leaving most citizens behind," he wrote in a separate statement.