Two hundred economists, sixteen of them Nobel laureates, have signed a statement on AI and the economy. The punchline: the smartest people in the room are telling you they cannot see the road.

Economists do not usually panic in public. This week, more than 200 of them did it together.

On Monday a group of the world's most decorated economists and AI researchers published a statement called We Must Act Now. It runs to just 88 words. It carries 16 Nobel laureates, the chief economists of both OpenAI and Anthropic, and a supporting cast that includes Eric Schmidt, Reid Hoffman, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun.

The message is blunt. AI “may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years”, the letter says. It could drive “an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame”. That might mean large-scale job losses, or major gains in living standards. The signatories want economists, policymakers and technology leaders to act now and build the guardrails.

The sceptics blinked

The interesting part is not the warning. It is the signatures.

Economists have spent years greeting Silicon Valley's job-apocalypse talk with a raised eyebrow. Technological change, they liked to note, arrives slower than the hype. So the striking names here are the ones who used to say exactly that.

Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, the MIT professors who shared the 2024 Nobel and long played down the AI-jobs scare, both signed. “There's been a notable change in the profession”, said Erik Brynjolfsson, the Stanford economist who organised the effort, speaking to the New York Times.

Acemoglu has not fully converted. He still doubts AI will move as fast as the boosters claim. But recent breakthroughs have rattled him. If AI does to white-collar work what robots did to factories, only faster, he told the Times, that “would be really disruptive, really costly for people's livelihoods”.

Driving in the fog

Here is the twist that makes the statement so odd. It is not a set of predictions. It is a confession.

The signatories are not claiming to know what happens next. They are admitting they cannot see it. “We are driving in the fog, and it is extraordinarily difficult to anticipate what will happen next”, said Tom Cunningham of the research group METR, one of the organisers, in the group's official announcement.

Anton Korinek, a University of Virginia economist now on leave at Anthropic, put a clock on it in the same release. “Steam, electricity, and computers each gave societies decades to adapt”, he said. “AI may give us only a few years.”

Brynjolfsson has been blunter still. He talks about “flying blind” into one of the most consequential periods in history. His fix is data. His Canaries dashboard, built with ADP and flagged by Fortune, tracks 4.6 million workers to catch trouble before it reaches the headline figures. It already shows employment for 22 to 25-year-olds in AI-exposed jobs shrinking more than 4 percent a year, even as the wider job market looks calm.

Nobody agrees what to measure

Not everyone is sold on the fog. Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo, did not sign. He argues that even “AI exposure”, the term at the centre of the debate, gets measured five different ways that disagree most where the stakes are highest, as Fortune reports. Read one way, telemarketers and writers are doomed. Read another, barely touched.

The timing is almost comic. Days before the letter landed, the bosses of Anthropic and OpenAI were busy softening their own doom forecasts, recasting AI as a productivity helper rather than a job killer, even as researchers still argue over whether it is quietly reshaping how people work.

A very European footnote

The list leans hard on Europe. LSE, Cambridge, Oxford, INSEAD, ETH Zurich, Toulouse and Bocconi all feature, alongside the Nobel laureate Christopher Pissarides. What none of them offer is a single concrete policy. There are no numbers, no bills, no institutions named.

That is the point, and the problem. Two hundred of the sharpest economic minds alive agree on one thing. They need better tools to see what is coming, and the guardrails are not built yet. The louder fight over who captures the gains can wait until they can read the map. On the evidence of this letter, the map does not yet exist.