# Why 16 Nobel laureates raised the red flag on AI > Source: > Published: 2026-07-13 20:28:52+00:00 AI's risks have gone beyond speculation. Nearly 200 economists and tech leaders have signed a new petition titled "[We Must Act Now](https://www.wemustactnow.ai)," highlighting the negative impacts AI technology will have on the economy, including job displacement, and urging leaders to take action now. The signees include prominent figures such as the chief economists of OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as 16 Nobel laureates. The statement, available for anyone [to sign](https://www.wemustactnow.ai/), is a concise, three-point list that summarizes the potential impact and concludes with a call to action: **Timeline**: "AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years."** Impact**: "This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame. It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards."**Call-to-action**: "Economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI and to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society." One of the petition's signers, [Alvin Wang Graylin](https://www.linkedin.com/in/agraylin/), digital fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), told The Deep View, "AI has become so polarizing these days that the noise is drowning out the very real problems right on our doorstep. If we keep debating instead of building, testing, and deploying solutions, the crises will arrive well before the benefits do. The time to act is now to prevent problems, not after the disruption hits, as traditionally happens." Petitions highlighting concerns about the reach of AI, given its rapid development, are nothing new. One of the [most notable](https://www.zdnet.com/article/musk-wozniak-and-other-tech-leaders-sign-petition-to-halt-ai-developments/) is a 2023 petition with over 1,800 signatories, including Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. However, the biggest difference here is that this focuses on the economic impacts, which have been highly debated among experts. For instance, [Preston Caldwell](https://www.morningstar.com/economy/5-myths-about-ais-economic-impact-what-data-actually-shows), the senior US economist for Morningstar Research Services, says early evidence signals that AI-driven automation may be no different from the automation that has occurred with other technologies throughout US history, including manufacturing and agriculture. “Adjusted for benchmark performance, the price of large language model queries has plummeted by orders of magnitude over the past few years. If AI becomes cheap enough, then human workers can still claim a large share of GDP even while focusing on a progressively smaller range of non-automatable tasks," said Caldwell. Of course, this comes against the backdrop of a series of layoffs that executives have pinned on AI. This year alone, Oracle, Meta, Cisco, Cloudflare, Coinbase, and more have blamed layoffs on AI. [Founders Reports](https://founderreports.com/ai-layoffs-tracker/) has put together an AI layoff tracker and claims that through June 2026, AI has been cited in 101,743 U.S. job cuts, nearly double the 54,836 attributed to it in all of 2025. ## Our Deeper *View* There's no denying that the speed at which AI is advancing and being deployed is unprecedented. The result is that no one truly understands what the outcome will be, and when something this disruptive touches the economy and people's livelihoods, that uncertainty demands care and scrutiny. That's something everyone across the board can agree on, regardless of where you land on the actual solutions. Even in the best-case scenario, where the AI boom doesn't turn to bust and instead becomes a durable part of the US economy, there will likely be a painful transition period, just as any structural shift produces short-term growing pains before things stabilize. And given AI's sheer reach, that short-term pain could still mean real disruption for a substantial portion of the population.