Statement from 200+ economists and AI researchers, including 16 Nobel winners, E. Schmidt, and R. Hoffman, calls for guardrails to steer AI toward complementing workers.
More than 200 economists and AI researchers signed a statement Monday calling for guardrails to steer artificial intelligence toward complementing human workers rather than replacing them. The statement, hosted by the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, counts 16 Nobel laureates among its signers.
The list includes former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. Ten people affiliated with Anthropic and six from OpenAI also signed, according to the statement page.
The statement warns that AI “may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years” and could bring “risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards.” It calls for “incentives, guardrails and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.”
Four economists organized the statement. Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, said “we must act now to guide AI to complement humans rather than simply imitate them – and to generate prosperity for the many, not just the few.” Ajay Agrawal of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management said “whether rapidly advancing AI broadly elevates global living standards or severely concentrates wealth is not predetermined; it depends on how we choose to rearchitect our political and economic systems today.”
Anton Korinek, a University of Virginia professor currently on leave at Anthropic, said “we cannot improvise our strategy and institutions in the middle of the transformation; waiting for certainty means arriving too late.” Tom Cunningham, a researcher at METR, said “it’s the right time for a coordinated effort to bring clarity to a confusing situation.”
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