A coalition of more than 200 top technology pioneers and leading economists has sounded the alarm over the unprecedented speed at which artificial intelligence is set to reshape the global economy, releasing a public statement Monday that calls for immediate, proactive action from policymakers and industry leaders to prepare for the coming shift.
Organized by the advocacy group We Must Act Now, the statement counts an extraordinary roster of high-profile signatories: more than a dozen Nobel Prize-winning economists, top executives from leading AI development firms including OpenAI and Anthropic, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and globally recognized AI researchers. Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson, one of the lead organizers of the initiative, explained that the statement was crafted to push the economics profession and global policymakers to stop underestimating AI’s potential to upend existing economic structures.
“While there has been a noticeable shift in how our field views AI, there remains a dangerous gap between what we recognize as a coming transformation and the preparations we have in place,” Brynjolfsson said. “I worry deeply that we are not ready for the tsunami of change that is approaching faster than many expect.”
The statement lays out three core pillars of the group’s warning. First, it projects that AI capabilities will grow exponentially more powerful over the coming decade, outpacing most public and institutional expectations. Second, this rapid advancement will trigger an economic transformation larger in scale than the Industrial Revolution — but unfold over a dramatically shorter timeline, bringing both massive opportunities for broad gains in living standards and severe risks including large-scale involuntary job displacement. Third, the statement argues that economists, policymakers, and technology leaders cannot afford to delay action: they must immediately invest in understanding the economic impacts of transformative AI, and build the regulatory guardrails, adaptive institutions, and aligned incentives needed to steer AI development toward a human-centric model that benefits all of society.
Unlike past waves of technological innovation that unfolded over generations, AI’s disruption will compress massive change into just a handful of years, leaving little time for workers, businesses, and governments to adapt, experts warn. 2024 Nobel Prize-winning MIT economist Daron Acemoglu drew a parallel to the disruption robots caused in global manufacturing, noting that a similar shift driven by AI in a far shorter timeline would impose severe, unnecessary harm on household livelihoods if unmanaged.
University of Virginia economics professor Anton Korinek emphasized that past general-purpose technologies — from steam power to electricity to personal computing — gave societies decades to adjust laws, build new institutions, and help workers transition. “AI may give us only a few years,” Korinek said. “We cannot improvise our strategy and build the systems we need in the middle of an ongoing transformation. Waiting for absolute certainty about AI’s impacts means we will be too late to avoid the worst harms.”
Yoshua Bengio, a pioneering AI researcher at the University of Montreal and Turing Award winner who signed the statement, echoed that urgency, arguing that leaving AI’s trajectory entirely to unregulated market forces risks leaving the vast majority of citizens behind. “Based on the clear current trajectory of AI development, it is highly plausible that AI will drastically transform our economies,” Bengio wrote. “We must be intentional and make collective, democratic choices, rather than letting market forces play out and risking leaving most citizens behind.”
Recent industry analysis backs up these warnings, projecting dramatic shifts in global labor markets by the end of the decade. Digital business firm Clickvision synthesized multiple independent studies to estimate that between 85 million and 92 million jobs worldwide could be displaced by AI automation by 2030, even as between 97 million and 170 million new roles are created by the technology. The analysis found that as much as 30% of all current jobs in the United States could become at least partially automated by 2030, and 60% of all roles will see major changes to their core day-to-day tasks as AI integration becomes standard. Even today, 11.7% of U.S. jobs are already fully automatable with existing technology, and Clickvision projects that 14% of the entire global workforce will be forced to switch career fields entirely by 2030 to remain employed.
Market analytics outlet datarefs.com identifies the sectors at highest immediate risk as manufacturing, customer service, transportation, and retail. Roles that rely heavily on existing AI tools — including interpreters, translators, and entry-level research positions that rely on generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, DeepL, and Google Translate for core tasks — also face a high risk of displacement in the near term. Younger workers and workers in advanced, highly tech-integrated economies are expected to face the most intense disruption from the shift, the outlet reported.
Notably, the experts signing the statement do not argue that AI will be a net negative for global society. Like past transformative technological shifts from the Industrial Revolution to the rise of personal computing, AI is expected to deliver long-term benefits that lift overall living standards. The core concern of the group is not AI itself, but the unprecedented speed of its adoption and transformation, which outpaces the adaptive capacity of existing labor institutions, social safety nets, and regulatory frameworks — a gap that could leave millions of workers vulnerable to unnecessary economic hardship without immediate intervention.