Also, the Economist publishes all articles anonymously so the individual author isn't known. As far as I know, they do this so we take all articles and opinions as the perspective of the Economist publication itself.
If it was disagreeing with AI maximalists, it was primarily in terms of the timeline, not in terms of the outcomes or inevitability of the scenario.
> If investors thought all this was likely, asset prices would already be shifting accordingly. Yet, despite the sky-high valuations of tech firms, markets are very far from pricing in explosive growth. “Markets are not forecasting it with high probability,” says Basil Halperin of Stanford, one of Mr Chow’s co-authors. A draft paper released on July 15th by Isaiah Andrews and Maryam Farboodi of mit finds that bond yields have on average declined around the release of new ai models by the likes of Openai and DeepSeek, rather than rising.
It absolutely (beyond being clearly titled "what if") presented real counterarguments to its core premise.
There are plenty of other scenarios that they have explored since then, including the totally contrary "What if the AI stock market blows up?" article.
This is pretty typical for them IME. They definitely have a bias, but they do try to explore multiple sides of the same idea in earnest.
> From an economic viewpoint, this also means that the brand value of the articles remains with the masthead rather than the individual authors. This commodifies the authors and makes then more fungible.
> Being The Economist, I am sure they are aware of this.