61 per cent of Americans believe AI could threaten humanity: Poll

A Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Wednesday (May 17) showed 61 per cent of Americans believe that artificial intelligence could threaten civilization. This comes as many companies across the board have raced to bring increasingly sophisticated models of AI to market, which has raised concerns among critics and industry experts.

The poll also showed that more than two-thirds of Americans are concerned about the negative effects of AI. However, it is not just people, critics or industry experts. The CEO of the organisation that began the so-called AI arms race, OpenAI, has also recently expressed concerns over the potential misuse of the technology.

On Tuesday, the CEO of the startup which created the ChatGPT chatbot, Sam Altman, addressed a panel of United States lawmakers and said regulation of the “increasingly powerful models” of artificial intelligence is “critical” to mitigate the risks the technology poses.

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It is also worth noting that Americans who voted for former US President Donald Trump expressed higher levels of concern that AI could threaten humankind. As 70 per cent of Trump voters agreed when compared to 60 per cent of voters of incumbent President Joe Biden, said the Reuters/Ipsos poll.

Meanwhile, in the context of religious beliefs, the poll also showed that 32 per cent of Evangelical Christians “strongly agree” that AI presents risks to humanity as opposed to 24 per cent, non-Evangelical Christians.

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According to the media report, 4,415 US adults participated in the online poll conducted between May 9 and May 15, which also has a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of plus or minus two percentage points. The poll also suggests that the number of Americans who believe in the adverse outcomes of AI is triple the number of those who don’t.

While 61 per cent of respondents believe that AI poses risks to humanity, 22 per cent disagreed, while 17 per cent were unsure, said the Reuters/Ipsos poll. However, there are also some in the industry who said that people should understand AI’s benefits too.

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“The concerns are very legitimate, but I think what’s missing in the dialogue in general is why are we doing this in the first place?” said Sebastian Thrun, a computer science professor at Stanford who also founded Google X, reported Reuters.

He spoke about how AI will improve people’s quality of life and help them be “more competent and more efficient.” Similarly, Altman also spoke about how AI is also beneficial to society and said that in time, generative AI developed by OpenAI will “address some of humanity’s biggest challenges, like climate change and curing cancer.”

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