Tech experts, economists warn of rapid AI disruption

More than 200 technology experts and economists have signed a statement warning of the sudden transformation that AI may cause in the economy.

Erik Brynjolfsson, a Stanford economist who helped organize the statement, which was released on Monday by We Must Act Now, said the purpose is to get economists and policymakers to take the disruptive potential of AI more seriously.

"There's been a notable change in the profession," Brynjolfsson said, adding that, however, "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".

Along with many other economists, Brynjolfsson believes that in the long run AI will be beneficial to society and help raise living standards, as happened with the Industrial Revolution and computing. But they are also concerned that the speed of change will be much faster than before, possibly leading to more abrupt and severe dislocations in the economy.

We Must Act Now's statement on AI's transformation of the economy made three points:

- AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years.

- This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame. It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards.

- 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 included over a dozen Nobel laureates, the chief economists of Open AI and Anthropic, co-founder of Anthropic Jack Clark, and the former chief executive of Google 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 Nobel Prize in 2024.

Digital marketing and recruitment services company Clickvision, citing numerous studies, reported that AI could displace 85-92 million jobs globally by 2030, while 97-170 million new jobs could be created.

It estimated that 30 percent of US jobs could be automated, at least partially, by 2030, and 60 percent of jobs "will experience significant task-level changes due to AI".

It said that 11.7 percent of US jobs could already be automated today, and "14 percent of the global workforce may be forced to change careers by 2030."

Market statistics website datarefs.com said that the industries most likely affected include manufacturing, customer service, transportation and retail. People with jobs like interpreters, translators and historians, who frequently use tools such as ChatGPT, DeepL and Google Translate to do many of their tasks, are at high risk of dislocation, it reported.

Younger workers, as well as more advanced economies that have already integrated technology, will be more highly affected, it predicted.

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

AI pioneer and University of Montreal professor Yoshua Bengio, who also signed the statement, wrote that based on the trajectory of AI development, "it is highly plausible that AI will drastically transform our economies".

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