More than anything, Americans fear who will control AI. They fear that Artificial Intelligence will be controlled by people who are greedy, selfish or irresponsible - much more than they fear losing their own job or AI leading to human extinction.
Now that I have repeated the survey, let’s see where Americans’ AI fears are directed.
4.1 Analysis, Visualization and Interpretation
I presented seven potential negative outcomes of artificial intelligence to survey respondents. In this Chapter, I will refer to these potential negative outcomes as Fear Scenarios (i.e. scenarios to be feared). Let’s first consider the 2023 survey of 500 US respondents from a representative sample. How much did they fear each scenario?
Code
library(tidyverse)library(scales)# The file ai-fear-scenarios-2023-wide-correlates.csv contains responses from a US representative sample of 500 respondents.# Download the file from a public Open Science Framework repository.responses =read_csv("https://osf.io/download/qpdvb/")# Select columns and pivot.fearResponses = responses %>%select(Extinction:Controlled_by_GSI) %>%pivot_longer(cols =everything(),names_to ="Fear",names_transform =list(Fear =~gsub("_", " ", .)),values_to ="Response")# Set up some options for the figure.#agi_2024_summary_caption = paste0("US representative sample, N = 501\nResponses collected April 2024\nSource: Thinking Machines, Pondering Humans by Dr. Jason Jeffrey Jones")fear_scenarios_summary_2023_caption =paste0("Source: Thinking Machines, Pondering Humans by Dr. Jason Jeffrey Jones")#fear_scenarios_summary_2023_colors = c("Possible to build" = "#798E87", "Should be built" = "#C27D38", "Same rights as a human" = "#CCC591")# Summary Fear 2023 figurefearResponses %>%group_by(Fear) %>%summarise(Mean_Response =mean(Response),sd =sd(Response),n =n(),se = sd /sqrt(n),error_low = Mean_Response - se,error_high = Mean_Response + se ) %>%ggplot(aes(x =reorder(Fear, Mean_Response), y = Mean_Response, color = Fear, fill = Fear)) +# Add green and red shading to demarcate agree vs disagree.annotate(geom="rect", xmin=-Inf, xmax=Inf, ymin=0.0, ymax=Inf, fill="green", alpha=0.1) +annotate(geom="rect", xmin=-Inf, xmax=Inf, ymin=-Inf, ymax=0.0, fill="red", alpha=0.1) +# Annotations go first, so data elements are layered on top.geom_col() +geom_errorbar(aes(ymin = error_low, ymax = error_high), color="black", width=0.2) +ggtitle("Americans' Fears of Artificial Intelligence", "Sept. 2023, Representative Sample, N = 500") +xlab("") +ylab("") +# Apply labels with wrapping.scale_x_discrete(labels =label_wrap(10)) +# Set color and fill values.#scale_fill_manual(values = agi_2024_summary_colors) + #scale_color_manual(values = agi_2024_summary_colors) + # Force y scale to -3 through 3. Put numbers on y-axis. Add low and high labels.scale_y_continuous(limits =c(-3,3), breaks =-3:3, labels =c("-3\nStrongly\ndisagree", "-2", "-1", "0\nNeither agree\nnor disagree", "1", "2", "3\nStrongly\nagree"), expand=expansion(mult =0.025)) +labs(caption = fear_scenarios_summary_2023_caption) +theme(plot.caption =element_text(size=10, color ="#666666")) +# The legend has only redundant information. Get rid of it.theme(legend.position ="none") +coord_flip()
2023 AI Fear Scenario results. On average, Americans TODO. Plotted is mean response on a 7-point Likert scale from Strongly disagree to Strongly agree. Black bars are +/- one standard error.
