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The economics profession and policymakers are not prepared for the scale of labor-market disruption that transformative AI is about to cause, even though views within the profession have shifted noticeably toward taking this risk seriously.
Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson, who helped organize the statement, says there's been a real shift among economists toward taking AI's disruptive potential seriously, but he worries institutions still aren't ready for what's coming. ✦ AI generated
Erik Brynjolfsson · Platformer · 2026-07-14 · original ↗
There's been a notable change in the profession... I still see a big gap there, a big mismatch, and I'm kind of worried that we're not going to be ready for the tsunami that's coming.
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- ·Notable shift: more economists now take AI disruption risk seriously
- ·Brynjolfsson helped organize a statement on this shift
- ·Institutions still lag behind the profession's changing views
- ·A big mismatch remains between insight and institutional readiness
- ·Brynjolfsson: worried we won't be ready for the 'tsunami'
- ·Scale of coming labor-market disruption still underestimated
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Counterpoint · 2
Everyone believes everything about how we work is about to be transformed by AI, but in reality, none of it has changed yet.David Pierce · Platformer · conf 60%Despite dramatic improvements in AI model performance, the majority of engineers will not be laid off — if anything, developers are busier than ever.NeetCode (Navdeep Singh) · The Pragmatic Engineer · conf 60%
This moment responds to
supports → AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years, driving an unprecedented economic transformation larger and faster than the Industrial Revolution, bringing both the risk of large-scale job displacement and the opportunity of major gains in living standards — economists, policymakers, and tech leaders must act now to build the guardrails and institutions to steer this transition.Erik Brynjolfsson and co-signatories of "We Must Act Now" · Platformerrebuts → It is inaccurate and psychologically harmful to claim that all jobs are going away or that AI will create a permanent underclass.Matan Grinberg · The Generalist