Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth, for the Colson Center on John Stone Street. On Monday, a group of nearly 200 artificial intelligence researchers and more than a dozen Nobel laureates in economics issued a short but pointed warning. In a statement of less than 100 words entitled, We Must Act Now, A Statement on AI's Transformation of the Economy, the group warned how the promising new technology could disrupt the economy and disenfranchise workers. The statement consisted of three points. Number one, AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years.
Number two, this could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter timeframe. It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards. Number three, 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. End quote. Among the notable signatories to the statement were economist Paul Krugman, executives from AI companies Anthropic and OpenAI, various tech investors, former government officials, and scholars from institutions like Stanford, Cambridge, Columbia, Harvard, and MIT.
Of course, this group is right to be concerned about how AI will impact work. According to a report from December, of the over 1 million U.S. jobs that were cut in 2025, AI was quote unquote responsible for over 50,000. And more job loss like that will, of course, create only additional incentives for politicians and states to feel like they need to intervene within the job market. As one of the statement's organizers put it, in what was both a grand understatement of reality and a gross overstatement of confidence, and I quote, AI capabilities are advancing far faster than our understanding of the economic implications.
We must act now to guide AI, to complement humans rather than simply imitate them, and to generate prosperity for the many, not just the few.
Well, thankfully, the statement itself seemed to admit a bit more uncertainty, saying things like AI may become and it could bring risks as well as opportunities. Even so, what's far more uncertain is what, if anything, economists, policymakers, and technology leaders could do, even if they were able to fully quote unquote understand the economics of transformative AI. Is it even possible, for example, especially for those who are part of much larger corporate or governmental entities who carry their own economic realities, to even imagine what the right incentives, guardrails, and institutions would be? Is it even plausible to believe that we would be able to quote unquote steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society? On the other hand, to do nothing, even if the cynicism is justified, is still to do nothing.
And as these signatories in the statement itself recognize, there's too much at stake to do that. And even more, any potential shifts in employment and the economy are just downstream from much larger concerns. Even in addition to concerns specific to the ethics of artificial intelligence, are what might be called pre-existing conditions that inflict and hamper the Western world, specifically the crisis of meaning and what Carl Truman has called the desecration of humanity. To borrow a framework from T.S. Eliot, we will never be able to truly know what we should and should not do with a particularly powerful technology unless we first know what that technology is for.
In his 1951 address to the faculty of the University of Chicago about the purpose of education, Elliot said this: If we see a new and mysterious machine, I think the first question is, What is the machine for? And afterward, we ask, How does it do it? In other words, purpose has to precede function. Elliott, however, then went on to say that it's only ever possible to grasp the purpose of something in view of the purpose of everything, specifically the purpose of humanity.
So our ethics are downstream from an understanding of what it means to be human, what we are for. Only with some kind of grasp on who we are can we really know whether or not a technology is serving us or substituting for us. Only in view of the created exceptionalism of the image of God within us can we draw that line between a technology that will restore and one that will replace. Christians who have been given an understanding of who we are and what we are for in Holy Scripture have to join this conversation sooner rather than later. And that's why on Thursday, August the 7th, the Colson Center will be hosting a conversation entitled Staying Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
It's the eighth annual Great Lakes Symposium on Christian Worldview. Joining me for this essential conversation will be Abdou Muri, author of the new book, Fake ID, How AI and Identity Ideology are Collapsing Reality, and speaker and former host of the Microsoft Research Podcast, Gretchen Heisinger. a member of the Oxford Collaboration on Theology and Artificial Intelligence. We'll also be hearing that evening from eminent author and apologist John Lennox via video.
So either join us in person at Bay Harbor, Michigan, or sign up to host the live stream. Churches and groups are welcome. Attendance is free, but registration is required because space is limited. Go to colsoncenter.org slash livestream to register. That's colsoncenter.org slash livestream.
