The economic effects of artificial intelligence are forcing their way back to the center of public debate.
A few days ago, a group of more than 200 world-renowned economists and AI researchers, among them 16 Nobel laureates, published a statement calling on institutions to act immediately to «govern» what risks being a revolution far more disruptive than the industrial one.
The «We Must Act Now» appeal
The document, titled We Must Act Now, was published on Monday, July 13, 2026. Its central thesis is that increasingly powerful artificial intelligence could upend the global economy over a far shorter span of time than the Industrial Revolution required.
Economist Anton Korinek, one of the promoters of the initiative, put it this way: «Steam, electricity, and computers each gave societies decades to adapt; AI may give us only a few years. We cannot improvise our strategy and institutions in the middle of the transformation; waiting for certainty means arriving too late.»
The signatories share that view, and the list brings together major names from both academia and industry. Alongside the 16 Nobel laureates — among them Daron Acemoglu of MIT and Michael Spence — are leading figures from the technology sector: Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, OpenAI chief financial officer Sarah Friar, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean.
A new industrial revolution with potentially devastating effects
The statement opens with a warning that AI could become considerably more powerful over the next decade, driving a transformation larger than that of the Industrial Revolution and compressed into a very short window.
That transformation could raise productivity and improve living standards. It could also prove devastating for the world of work.
The call to governments
Ajay Agrawal, one of the best-known academics at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, argues that the real impact of AI will depend on the decisions taken before the technology reaches its full potential.
Whether technological change narrows global disparities in living standards or, on the contrary, concentrates wealth further in a few hands is not, in Agrawal’s view, predetermined. Either way, governments cannot afford to wait for the transformation to be complete.
This is one of the central points of the appeal: a request to economists, to the leaders of AI companies and to policymakers to prepare for and manage the economic consequences of the revolution before doing so becomes impossible.
Leaders, according to the signatories of We Must Act Now, must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI, and must start designing the incentives, safeguards and governance systems needed to steer the technology toward an approach that complements human capabilities rather than replacing them or rendering them irrelevant.
The problem is urgent. A recent analysis by the IMF (International Monetary Fund) estimates that roughly 40% of jobs worldwide are exposed to the effects of AI, a share that climbs to 60% in advanced economies. More unsettling still is the World Economic Forum’s projection that some 92 million jobs will be displaced by 2030 because of technological change — a figure the WEF pairs with 170 million new roles it expects to be created over the same period, for a net gain of about 78 million.
Editor’s note
This article was originally published in Italian on money.it by Andrea Fabbri on July 18, 2026 as «“L’IA potrebbe darci solo pochi anni”. 16 premi Nobel e 200 economisti di fama mondiale lanciano l’allarme». It has been translated and adapted for an international audience by the Money.it International desk.
