According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, three times as many Americans believe AI will have negative effects as do not.
The majority of Americans polled in a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday believe that the rapid development of artificial intelligence technologies could endanger humankind.
The negative implications of AI worry more than two-thirds of Americans, and 61% think they could endanger civilisation.
The rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) into daily life has propelled AI to the forefront of public discourse, with OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot becoming the fastest-growing application of all time. An AI arms race has begun thanks to ChatGPT, with industry giants like Microsoft and Google competing to outdo one another in their AI achievements.
Government officials and AI businesses are also worried: Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, spoke before the US Congress on Tuesday. He raised worries about possible technology abuse and urged legislation.
“This genie cannot be contained in a bottle. During a Senate session on the uses of AI on Tuesday, Senator Cory Booker was one of many lawmakers who raised concerns about the best way to govern AI.
According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, three times as many Americans believe AI will have negative effects as do not.
The statistics show that 61% of respondents think AI endangers humans, while only 22% disagree and 17% are undecided.
People who supported Donald Trump in the 2020 election showed greater levels of worry; 70% of Trump supporters and 60% of Joe Biden supporters concurred that AI could endanger civilization.
In terms of religious convictions, 32% of Evangelical Christians and 24% of non-Evangelical Christians, respectively, were more likely to “strongly agree” that AI poses hazards to mankind.
“It’s telling such a broad swath of Americans worry about the negative effects of AI,” said Landon Klein, director of U.S. policy at the Future of Life Institute, the group behind an open letter that Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, co-signed calling for a six-month halt to AI development. We see the current situation as the start of the nuclear era, and we have the advantage of the public’s sense of the necessity of taking action.
Although AI is a concern for Americans, the economy and crime are more pressing dinner table issues: In order to combat crime, 77% support boosting police expenditure, while 82% are concerned about the possibility of a recession.
Industry insiders argued that the public has to be made more aware of the advantages of AI.
The worries are extremely valid, but in my opinion, the question of “why are we doing this in the first place” is being left out of the conversation as a whole. stated Sebastian Thrun, the Google X founder and a professor of computer science at Stanford. AI will improve people’s quality of life and make them more capable and effective.
According to Ion Stoica, a UC Berkeley professor who also co-founded the AI business Anyscale, the benefits of AI, such as how it is transforming drug development, are not as obvious as ChatGPT.
