A revised count shows 16 Nobel laureates signed the Monday statement, as economists warn that uncertainty over AI’s labor impact is being compounded by disputed ways of measuring job exposure.
More than 200 economists and researchers, including 16 Nobel laureates and the chief economists of OpenAI and Anthropic, have called for urgent work to understand and manage AI’s economic impact as the technology advances faster than the profession’s ability to measure its effects. The Monday statement, “We Must Act Now,” says AI could transform the economy on a scale larger than the Industrial Revolution but over a much shorter period, creating both risks such as large-scale job displacement and opportunities including higher living standards. Anton Korinek, a University of Virginia economics professor and one of the organizers, said economists are effectively “driving in the fog,” while Michael Spence called for an “all hands on deck” effort to steer AI in beneficial directions. Daron Acemoglu and Erik Brynjolfsson, who have differed sharply on AI productivity estimates, both backed the initiative, underscoring how broad the concern has become. The debate is being complicated by a lack of agreed measurement tools. Brynjolfsson’s Canaries Dashboard with ADP Research tracks 4.6 million workers across more than 730 occupations in near real time and indicates that employment for workers aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed occupations is shrinking by more than 4% annually even as headline labor data remains steady. Torsten Slok of Apollo Global Management argued that the central idea of “AI exposure” itself is contested across five different frameworks, with theoretical measures generally showing higher risk than usage-based ones. His conclusion was that claims a job is highly exposed to AI depend heavily on which measure is being used.