New Delhi, July 22 -- On 13 June, nearly 200 economists and AI researchers, including a dozen Nobel laureates and the chief economists of OpenAI and Anthropic, signed a blunt statement. Titled 'We Must Act Now,' it warns that AI "may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years," thus transforming the economy more powerfully than the Industrial Revolution, but far faster. The explicit risk: large-scale job displacement.

What makes it remarkable is who signed it. Among them are Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, MIT winners of the 2024 Nobel prize who spent years resisting such alarms. The lead coordinator of last month's statement, Stanford's Erik Brynjolfsson, fears the world is unprepared.

That should concern India more than m...