The effects of artificial intelligence are forcefully back at the center of public debate.
A few days ago a group of 200 world-renowned economics experts, including 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 an increasingly powerful artificial intelligence could upend the global economy over a far shorter span of time than the Industrial Revolution did.
Economist Anton Korinek, one of the promoters of the initiative, said that «AI may only give us a few years» to adapt.
The signatories share that view, and the list includes major names from both academia and industry. There are no fewer than 16 Nobel laureates in economics, among them Daron Acemoglu of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Michael Spence of New York University, alongside 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 the warning that AI could become even more powerful over the coming decade, driving a transformation greater than that of the Industrial Revolution and compressed into an extremely short window of time.
That transformation could, on one hand, raise productivity and improve living standards. On the other, it risks proving devastating for the world of work.
The appeal 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 made before the technology reaches its full potential».
Whether technological evolution narrows global gaps in living standards or, on the contrary, concentrates wealth further in a few hands is not predetermined, according to Agrawal. Either way, governments «cannot afford to wait until the transformation is complete».
This is one of the core points of the appeal: the request that economists, the leaders of AI companies, and policymakers prepare for and manage the economic consequences of the revolution before doing so becomes impossible.
Leaders, according to the We Must Act Now signatories, «must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI» and start designing incentives, safeguards, and governance systems 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 are exposed to the effects of AI, a share that rises to 60% within advanced economies. More unsettling still is the World Economic Forum’s projection that by 2030 nearly 92 million jobs will disappear because of technological change.
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.
