‘We Must Act Now’: Eric Schmidt, Reid Hoffman, Joseph Stiglitz among 200 who just sounded an alarm on AI

More than 200 economists, tech bosses and researchers from across the globe have put their names on a short, sharply worded open letter cautioning that artificial intelligence is on track to shake up the job market in a big way, and that governments are lagging behind. Organised by the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, the letter is titled “We Must Act Now,” with the subtitle “A Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy.” It runs to just 88 words, and every one of them appears to have been chosen with care.

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That brevity is exactly what makes the letter stand out. Getting rival camps, the people building AI and the economists who study what AI might break, to agree on anything is rare. Getting them to agree in under 100 words is rarer still. That’s the real story here: not just what the letter says, but who is standing behind it.

The Guest List Reads Like A Tech-Economics Power Summit

Scroll through the signatories and a few names jump out immediately. Former Google chief Eric Schmidt is on there. So is LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. Three Nobel laureates — Joseph Stiglitz, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson — have added their signatures too. From inside the AI industry itself come Google AI lead Jeff Dean, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark and OpenAI’s finance chief Sarah Friar. Even the so-called “Godfathers of AI,” Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, along with venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, are named.

Put simply, this isn’t a letter from AI skeptics on the outside looking in. Several of the people who signed it are the very ones building the technology being warned about.

So What Does The Letter Actually Say?

Strip away the drama, and the message is fairly simple: AI is going to get a lot more powerful over the next decade, and if policymakers don’t get moving, a lot of people could lose their jobs. Here is the letter, word for word:
‘We Must Act Now’
A Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy
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.

Not Everyone Agrees On How Bad It’ll Get

The letter lands at a moment when opinions on AI and jobs are all over the map. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has gone further than most, predicting that AI could wipe out as much as half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. Not everyone shares that level of alarm, many economists and technologists land somewhere in the middle, arguing that AI is more likely to reshape jobs than erase them completely.

Either way, the message from this unusually broad coalition of signatories is the same: the clock is running, and the guardrails aren’t built yet.