More than 200 experts call for preparation for AI’s economic impact

More than 200 economists and artificial-intelligence researchers signed a statement calling for action now to prepare for a potentially rapid economic transformation. The document warns about risks such as job displacement while also pointing to opportunities such as gains in living standards; it does not present either outcome as inevitable.

What happened

The Stanford Digital Economy Lab published the “We Must Act Now” initiative on July 13. According to the lab, the statement has been signed by more than 200 economists and AI researchers from universities and research organizations around the world, including 16 Nobel laureates. The Associated Press also reported that some signatories work at companies including Anthropic, Google and OpenAI.

The core statement is only four sentences long. It says AI “may” become radically more powerful over the next ten years and that this development “could” drive an economic transformation on a large scale over a much shorter period than previous technological revolutions. Its scenarios include both large-scale job displacement and major gains in living standards.

Its concrete request is neither a halt to all adoption nor a deadline for an expected crisis. It asks economists, policymakers and technology leaders to study the economics of transformative AI and build incentives, guardrails and institutions that steer its use toward complementing people.

Why it matters

The statement’s editorial value lies less in predicting how many jobs will disappear than in the breadth of the call to prepare. Labor markets do not change only when a company announces layoffs. They also change when employers redesign tasks, reduce entry-level roles, raise qualification requirements, concentrate decisions in platforms or shift productivity gains toward actors that already control capital, data and computing capacity.

For workers, the debate points to continuing education, occupational mobility and protection during transitions. For companies, it means evaluating AI not only by time saved, but also by how benefits are distributed, how work quality changes and whether automated decisions can be supervised. For governments and universities, it raises questions about measurement, education, competition, social insurance and access to productive tools.

What changes for users, companies and the AI ecosystem

The statement does not create a regulation or require companies to change products. Its immediate effect is to increase intellectual and public pressure on institutions that often react only after a technology has already reshaped markets and jobs.

It also helps separate two debates that are frequently blended together. One is technical: how far models will actually advance during the next decade. The other is institutional: which rules, incentives and public capabilities should exist if progress is rapid. Although the first question remains uncertain, the signatories argue that waiting for complete certainty before preparing for the second would be a poor strategy.

From a social perspective, “complementing people” requires concrete choices. A company can use AI to expand a team’s capacity, or it can remove tasks without sharing productivity gains. The outcome depends on job design, competition among providers, workers’ bargaining power and transition policies—not only on the model being deployed.

What remains unclear

The statement is not an empirical study, a labor forecast or proof that mass displacement will happen. It does not estimate how many jobs may change, which sectors would move first or which policies would work best. It also does not necessarily represent the corporate positions of the companies where some signatories work.

The list of supporters is a meaningful signal, but it does not erase disagreement among economists over productivity, wages, inequality and the speed of adoption. The strongest bounded conclusion is that a broad group of specialists considers major economic transformation plausible and wants institutions to build response capacity before its exact scale is known.

Written by Lía Torres — Social and strategic perspective.

Sources consulted

We Must Act Now; Stanford Digital Economy Lab; Associated Press; NBC News. Exact canonical links appear in the Sources section below.