A group of more than 200 economists and AI researchers, including over a dozen Nobel laureates, released a statement Monday warning that AI could drive an economic transformation larger than the Industrial Revolution on a far shorter timeline, with large-scale job displacement among the key risks. The brief letter, “We Must Act Now,” calls on economists, policymakers and technology leaders to build the institutions needed to steer AI toward complementing human workers, rather than displacing them.
The statement was released through the Stanford Digital Economy Lab along with economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Ajay Agrawal, Anton Korinek and Tom Cunningham. Korinek, currently on leave at Anthropic, said in the announcement that earlier technologies gave societies decades to adjust, while the current reality is that wholesale change is coming in a matter of just a few years.
Why this list matters to HR
The economists behind the core evidence on automation, skills and generative AI are the ones urging urgent preparation for job disruption.
The list includes key researchers who have helped build the evidence base HR draws on for workforce planning:
- MIT’s David Autor, whose work documented how technology impacted middle-skill jobs
- Harvard’s Lawrence Katz and David Deming, whose research on skills, education and wages reshaped how economists understand inequality in the labor market
- Yale’s Pascual Restrepo, co-author of the foundational models on automation and employment
- University of Chicago’s Anders Humlum, whose early studies of gen AI’s workplace effects are already widely cited in the field
- Christopher Pissarides of the London School of Economics, who won his Nobel for research on labor markets and unemployment
Scholars whose work speaks directly to HR practice also appear. Wharton’s Prasanna Tambe studies people analytics and technical talent; Harvard Business School’s Raffaella Sadun researches management practices; and Matt Beane of UC Santa Barbara has shown how automation can starve early-career workers of the on-the-job learning that builds expertise.
Leaders with direct commercial stakes in AI’s growth also chose to put their names on a warning about disruption rather than minimizing it. Among them are Anthropic’s Jack Clark, Google’s Jeff Dean and OpenAI’s Sarah Friar, along with Eric Schmidt and Reid Hoffman.
Where HR Tech 2026 picks up the thread
Translating urgency into workforce strategy is the work ahead for HR leaders, and several sessions at the upcoming HR Technology Conference, Oct. 20–22 in Las Vegas, take it on directly.
The compressed-timeline problem will be a key focus of i4cp founder Kevin Oakes’ Strategy Summit keynote on agility routines, which examines how organizations can respond when disruption stops being episodic. The displacement and career-path question runs through a mega session led by Sarah Brown, senior vice president of global talent acquisition and mobility at TIAA, on internal mobility and talent agility when traditional career ladders look different today and in the future.
The economists’ central complaint is that AI capability is outrunning economic understanding, yet most organizations cannot model what their own AI workforce decisions cost or return. WorkTech founder George LaRocque will devote a breakout session to that concept, while the Josh Bersin Company’s executive series on the HR operating model of 2030 and the full-day Redesigning Work intensive will both tackle the institutional redesign the signatories say cannot wait.
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