Ezra Karger

“The median respondent in each group expects substantial advances in AI capabilities by 2030, small declines in labor force participation consistent with demographic shifts, and an annual GDP growth rate of 2.5%, which exceeds both the typical medium-run (2.0%) and long-run (1.7%) baseline forecasts from government agencies and private-sector forecasters.”

“Conditional on a “rapid” AI progress scenario … experts forecast substantial, though not historically unprecedented, economic shifts: annualized GDP growth rising to around 4% and the labor force participation rate falling from its current level of 62% to 55% by 2050, with roughly half of that decline—equivalent to around 10 million lost jobs—attributable to AI.”

“A variance decomposition suggests that expert disagreement about these effects is driven primarily by different beliefs about the economic effects of highly capable AI systems rather than by disagreement about the pace of AI progress.”

“Economists strongly favor targeted policy interventions such as AI-focused worker retraining (71.8% support) over broad structural interventions like job guarantees (13.7%) or universal basic income (37.4%), whereas the general public supports both targeted and broad interventions.”

“We also note that worlds with rapid AI progress likely differ from worlds with slow progress in ways that extend beyond AI capabilities themselves, so this gap should be understood as the estimated effect of moving between scenarios that are focused on AI rather than a cleanly identified causal effect of AI capabilities alone.”