The middle of a journey
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Wednesday showed a majority of Americans believe the rise of artificial intelligence technology could put humanity’s future in jeopardy. The poll found that more than two-thirds of respondents are concerned about the negative impact of AI, while 61% believe AI is a potential threat to civilization.
The online poll was conducted from May 9 to May 15 and extracted the opinions of 4,415 US adults. Confidence intervals (measures of precision) are plus or minus two percentage points.
The poll results come amid growing use of generative AI in education, government, healthcare, and business. Part of the catalyst is the explosive growth of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the fastest growing software application of all time. The success of this application started a technology hype race among tech giants such as Microsoft and Google. These companies stand to benefit from having something new and hot that could drive their stock price up.
Concerns about AI have recently been publicly whispered, justified or not, thanks to high-profile events such as the “AI Suspension” letter and Jeffrey Hinton’s resignation from Google. In a recent high-profile case about AI concerns, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman testified before the U.S. Congress on Tuesday, expressing concern about the potential misuse of AI technology, calling for regulations such as: asked for may help his company maintain its technological lead and curb competition.
Lawmakers appear to share some of these concerns, with Sen. Cory Booker saying, “There is no way to put this genie in a bottle. Globally, this concern is exploding,” Reuters reported. Communications reported.
This negative fear message seems to be having an effect. Americans’ concern about AI’s potential harm far outweighs their optimism about AI’s benefits, with 3 to 1 more people predicting harm than not predicting harm. . “Data show that 61% of respondents believe AI poses a risk to humanity, but only 22% disagree and 17% remain unsure,” Reuters wrote.
The poll also revealed a political divide in perceptions of AI, with 70 percent of Donald Trump supporters expressing greater concerns about AI compared to 60 percent of Joe Biden supporters. It expresses great concern about AI. In terms of religious beliefs, evangelical Christians were more likely to “strongly agree” that AI poses a risk to human civilization (32%), compared to non-evangelicals (24%).
Reuters has reached out to Landon Klein, Director of U.S. Policy at the Future of Life Institute, who wrote an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on AI research into systems “more powerful” than GPT-4. I took “This speaks to how many Americans are concerned about the negative effects of AI,” Klein said. “We see the present as the beginning of the nuclear age, and we are benefiting from public awareness consistent with the need to take action.”
On the other hand, another group of AI researchers, led by Timnit Gebru, Emily M. Bender, and Margaret Mitchell (three authors of widely-cited critical papers on large-scale language models), argued that AI systems are indeed not potentially harmful. However, a pervasive concern about AI states: Powered Apocalypse is misguided. Instead, they prefer to focus on issues of “transparency, accountability, and prevention of exploitative labor practices.”
Another problem with this poll is that the term AI is an ambiguous term that often means different things to different people. Almost every American now uses “AI” (and the software tools that were once thought of as “AI”) in their daily lives without much notice or publicity, but Reuters/Ipsos It is unclear whether the poll made any attempt to give respondents such a distinction. At the time of writing, we did not have access to the poll methodology or raw poll results.
In line with this line, Reuters quoted Ion Stoika, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and co-founder of AI company Anyscale, to point out this potential contradiction. “Americans may not realize how pervasive AI is already in their daily lives, whether at home or at work,” he said.
