ON A Monday afternoon in May, a final-year student, fresh off the Texas A&M University-Commerce graduation stage, received a shocking email. "The final grade for the course is due today at 5 p.m.," it read. "I will be giving everyone in this course an… incomplete." According to a report in the Washington Post, agricultural sciences professor Jared Mumm had run his students' essays through the AI tool ChatGPT, which had detected its own use in the work – an offence that warranted a zero on the assignment.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and emerging technologies (ET) are poised to transform modern society in profound ways. As with electricity in the last century, AI is an enabling technology that will animate everyday products and communications, endowing everything from cars to cameras with the ability to interact with the world around them, and with each other. These developments are just the beginning, and as AI/ET matures, it will have sweeping impacts on our work, security, politics, and very lives.1 These technologies are already impacting the world around us, as Darrell West and I wrote in our April 2018 piece "How artificial intelligence is transforming the world," and I highly recommend that anyone just discovering the topic of AI policy read it thoroughly. There, Darrell and I describe several important implications related to AI/ET, but chief among them is that these technology developments are on the cusp of ushering in a true revolution in human affairs at an increasingly fast pace. As AI continues to influence and shape existing industries and allows new ones to take root, its macro-level impact, particularly in the realm of economics, will become more and more apparent.