The Economist Breaking Ranks to Warn of AI's Transformative Power

Technologists tend to predict that the economic impacts of their creations will be unprecedented--and this is especially true when it comes to artificial intelligence. Last year, Elon Musk predicted that continued advances in AI would render human labor obsolete. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has written that AI will inevitably continue the shift in economic power from labor to capital and create "phenomenal wealth." Jensen Huang, CEO of semiconductor design firm Nvidia, has compared AI's development and deployment to a "new industrial revolution." But while the technologists are bullish on the economic impacts of AI, members of that other technocratic priesthood with profound influence over public life--the economists--are not.