Half way through the journey
A majority of Americans believe the rise of artificial intelligence technology could jeopardize the future of humanity, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll published Wednesday. The poll found that more than two-thirds of respondents are concerned about the adverse effects of AI, while 61 percent see it as a potential threat to civilization.
The online poll, conducted from May 9 to May 15, polled the opinions of 4,415 American adults. It has a credibility interval (a measure of accuracy) of plus or minus two percentage points.
The survey results come amid the surge in generative AI use in education, government, medicine and business, driven in part by the explosive growth of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, reportedly the fastest-growing software application of all time. The application’s success has sparked a technology hype among tech giants like Microsoft and Google, who will benefit from something new and vibrant to potentially boost their share prices.
Fear of AI, rightly so or not, has been rumbling through public discourse lately due to high-profile events such as the “AI pause” letter and Geoffery Hinton’s resignation from Google. In a recent high-profile case of AI detention, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, testified before the US Congress on Tuesday, expressing concern about the potential misuse of AI technology and calling for regulation that, according to criticscan help his company maintain its technological edge and suppress competition.
Lawmakers appear to share some of these concerns, with Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) noting, “There’s no way to put this genie in the bottle. Globally, this is exploding,” Reuters reported.
This negative scare tactic seems to be working. Americans’ fears about AI’s potential for harm far outweigh optimism about its benefits, with those predicting adverse outcomes three times more likely than those who don’t. “According to the data, 61% of respondents believe AI poses risks to humanity, while only 22% disagreed and 17% remained unsure,” Reuters wrote.
The poll also revealed a political divide in perceptions of AI, with 70 percent of Donald Trump voters more concerned about AI versus 60 percent of Joe Biden voters. With regard to religious beliefs, evangelicals were 32 percent more likely to “strongly agree” that AI poses risks to human civilization, compared to 24 percent of non-evangelicals.
Reuters contacted Landon Klein, director of US policy at the Future of Life Institute, who wrote the open letter asking for a six-month pause in AI research into systems “more powerful” than GPT- 4. “It indicates that such a broad group of Americans are concerned about the negative effects of AI,” Klein said. “We see the present moment similar to the beginning of the nuclear age, and we have the advantage of public perception consistent with the need to take action.”
Meanwhile, another group of AI researchers led by Timnit Gebru, Emily M. Bender and Margaret Mitchell (three authors of a widely cited critical article on large language models) say that while AI systems are indeed potentially harmful, prevailing concerns about AI powered apocalypse is misplaced. They prefer to focus on “transparency, accountability and preventing exploitative labor practices”.
Another problem with the poll is that AI is a vague term that often has different meanings for different people. Nearly all Americans now use “AI” (and software tools that were once considered “AI”) in our everyday lives without much attention or fanfare, and it’s unclear whether the Reuters/Ipsos poll made any attempt to make that sort of distinction. make for the respondents. We did not have access to the poll methodology or raw poll results at the time of writing.
Along those lines, Reuters quoted Ion Stoica, a UC Berkeley professor and co-founder of AI company Anyscale, as pointing out this potential contradiction. “Americans may not realize how ubiquitous AI already is in their daily lives, both at home and at work,” he said.
