New Delhi: A group of over 200 economists, researchers, and tech leaders have signed an open statement warning about how artificial intelligence could change the economy over the next decade, leading to massive unemployment.
The letter, released on Monday and titled ‘We Must Act Now’, has been signed by 15 Nobel laureates, including economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and Joseph Stiglitz, along with chief economists of Anthropic and OpenAI, two of the world’s leading AI firms.
The statement warns that “AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years”, while calling for urgent measures to prevent the risks associated with it.
This rapid advancement in the capabilities of AI tools and systems could transform the global economy unprecedentedly, “larger than the Industrial Revolution”. And this is expected to happen “over a vastly shorter time frame,” according to researchers from prominent universities — such as University of Cambridge, Stanford University, University of Toronto , Columbia University, Harvard University, Columbia University, and MIT — who are among the signatories.
The statement claims that a “large-scale job displacement” could get triggered due to advancing AI, while also highlighting that it might also create new opportunities, such as improvements in living standards.
The signatories appeal to policymakers, economists, and technology leaders to “act now to understand the economics of transformative AI and to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.”
The signatories also include former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, and Indian-origin venture capitalist and tech entrepreneur Vinod Khosla.
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Bracing for the ‘tsunami’
The statement was organised by Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson, who warned that policymakers and economists were not ready for the disruption AI is likely to bring in the coming years.
“There’s been a notable change in the profession. 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,” he told The New York Times.
MIT professor Daron Acemoglu, too, expressed concerns over the job losses driven by AI adoption.
“If you look at what robots did in the manufacturing sector, if A.I. does something equivalent in a more compressed time period, that would be really disruptive, really costly for people’s livelihoods,” the Nobel laureate said.
Of course, this isn’t the first time experts or researchers have come forward to flag the risks associated with AI. Last month, an international alliance of intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency (NSA) of the US, issued a joint statement warning that AI models capable of launching major cyber attacks were months, not years, away.