AI as an opportunity, but also a burden
“Steam engines, electricity and computers each gave societies decades to adapt. Artificial intelligence could only give us a few years to do so. We cannot only improvise our strategy and our institutions in the midst of change. Anyone who waits for certainty comes too late,” explains Anton Korinek, professor at the University of Virginia, who is currently on leave at Anthropic.
His colleague and co-signer Ajay Agrawal, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, agrees: “Whether the rapid advance of AI broadly raises global living standards or concentrates wealth in the hands of a few is not predetermined. It depends on how we redesign our political and economic systems today. We cannot afford to wait for the transformation to fully occur and, in the meantime, rely on institutional structures optimized for a world ahead of high-precision AI were.”
The appeal does not contain any concrete political proposals, but does make demands on economists, politicians and technology companies. You should:
