Economists and Nobel laureates issue the 'We Must Act Now' AI statement
More than 200 economists and AI researchers, among them 16 Nobel laureates, called for urgent work to prepare for AI's economic effects — a plea for preparation rather than a call to pause.
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The Stanford Digital Economy Lab published “We Must Act Now: A Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy”, signed by more than 200 economists and AI researchers, including 16 Nobel laureates. It was organised by Erik Brynjolfsson, Ajay Agrawal, Anton Korinek and Tom Cunningham.
The statement argued that AI may become far more capable over the coming decade, potentially driving an economic transformation larger than the Industrial Revolution but compressed into a much shorter span, and that understanding of the consequences was lagging badly behind the technology. Its central demand was for preparation:
Economists, policymakers and technology leaders must 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 spanned much of the economics profession’s front rank — among them Daron Acemoglu, Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman and Ben Bernanke — alongside AI researchers such as Yoshua Bengio and former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt. Unlike open letters that have called for pausing or prohibiting the most advanced systems, this one asked not for restraint on development but for the economics of the transition to be studied and governed before it arrives, framing the gap between capability and understanding as the place where “the greatest opportunities of our era” lay.