illustration of a dollar rended in a digital code texture

Illustration: The Economist

Jun 15th 2026|Paris|8 min read

Artificial intelligence has already created trillions of dollars of market value and turned a handful of tech nerds into celebrities. The public is excited and terrified in equal measure. Many brainy people, from Bill Gates to Elon Musk, say that the technology is just getting started. Talk to academic economists, though, and most seem oddly uninterested in studying the impact of the potentially world-changing technology. The centre of gravity in ai economics is instead shifting away from universities—and a gang of “ai-pilled economists” is leading the charge (see chart 1).

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