‘We are driving in the fog’: Hundreds of economists admit they’re flying blind on AI

“We are driving in the fog, and it is extraordinarily difficult to anticipate what will happen next.”

That alarmed voice is coming straight from the top of the economics profession. That’s Anton Korinek, a University of Virginia economics professor and one of the organizers of a statement signed this week by over 200 economists—including 16 Nobel laureates and the chief economists of OpenAI and Anthropic—admitting, in effect, that the profession is flying blind on AI.

The short statement, “We Must Act Now,” released Monday, doesn’t claim to have answers and claims the field is dangerously behind on the questions. It only offers three warnings.

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.

Michael Spence, a Nobel laureate at NYU, called for an “all hands on deck” approach to “steering AI in beneficial directions”—given the scale, scope and speed of its advancements, along with the high degree of uncertainty about how big and when the impact will arrive.

That cuts to the heart of this document’s unusual nature: it’s not a........

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