"We Must Act Now": Nobel Winners, Ex-Google CEO's Big Warning On AI

AI could trigger large scale job displacements and policy makers need to act urgently to mitigate the risks that artificial intelligence brings as it rapidly advances, according to a statement titled "We Must Act Now." The open letter has been signed by over 200 prominent economists and tech leaders including 16 Nobel laureates, ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and prominent Indian-American investor Vinod Khosla.

"AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years," reads the letter organised by Stanford University's digital economy lab. "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."

The statement released on Monday is concise, at 88 words.

The list of signatories also includes chief economists of rival AI companies, Open AI and Anthropic, along with the godfathers of AI Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun - two of the people who laid the foundation for modern-day AI.

The letter urges: "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."

From Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman to Google's AI chief Demis Hassabis, some of AI's most influential figures have said that growing anxiety about jobs and the future of work is understandable. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei too has consistently and urgently warned that AI is developing at a pace that governments and regulators are struggling to keep up with.

There are other giants of the industry such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos who have a contrarian view and claim "smart people" are driving the AI anxiety around job displacement. However, the reality is that tech giants globally and in India continue to cut jobs to build leaner, AI-native workforces. Over the last couple of years several organisations including Facebook-owner Meta, Amazon, Oracle, and Cognizant, have laid off thousands of employees across the board on account of "AI restructuring." 

To be sure, the signatories of Monday's open letter do not argue against AI itself. Instead, they call for policymakers to urgently study and prepare for AI's economic impact, so governments, businesses and workers are better equipped to manage the disruption.