Attitudes Toward Artificial General Intelligence: Results from American Adults in 2021 and 2023

Author(s)

  • Jason Jeffrey Jones and Steven Skiena

Full text (open access)

Abstract

  • A compact, inexpensive repeated survey on American adults’ attitudes toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) revealed a stable ordering but changing magnitudes of agreement toward three statements. Contrasting 2021 to 2023, American adults increasingly agreed AGI was possible to build. Respondents agreed more weakly that AGI should be built. Finally, American adults mostly disagree that an AGI should have the same rights as a human being; disagreeing more strongly in 2023 than in 2021.

Date

  • February, 2024

Citation

  • Jason Jeffrey Jones and Steven Skiena (2024). Attitudes Toward Artificial General Intelligence: Results from American Adults in 2021 and 2023. Seeds of Science. https://doi.org/10.53975/8b8e-9e08

  • BibTex

Areas

  • Social Sciences, Technology

Author Biography

  • Jason Jeffrey Jones is a computational social scientist whose expertise includes online experiments, social networks, high-throughput text analysis and machine learning. He is interested in humans’ perceptions of themselves and the developing role of artificial intelligence in society.  He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University.

  • Steven Skiena's research interests include the design of graph, string, and geometric algorithms, and their applications (particularly to biology). He is the author of five books, including "The Algorithm Design Manual" and "Calculated Bets: Computers, Gambling, and Mathematical Modeling to Win".  He is Distinguished Teaching Professor of Computer Science, Director of the Data Science Laboratory and Director of the Institute for AI-Driven Discovery and Innovation at Stony Brook University.

Donations

  • You can support continuing surveys by donating to Jason Jeffrey Jones at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/jasonjeffrc. Dr. Jones will personally match each donation dollar-for-dollar up to $1500 per year. All funds will be spent deploying nationally-representative-sample surveys and paying the respondents.

References

  1. Adams, T., Li, Y., & Liu, H. (2020). A Replication of Beyond the Turk: Alternative Platforms for Crowdsourcing Behavioral Research – Sometimes Preferable to Student Groups. AIS Transactions on Replication Research, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.17705/1atrr.00058

  2. Bubeck, S., Chandrasekaran, V., Eldan, R., Gehrke, J., Horvitz, E., Kamar, E., Lee, P., Lee, Y. T., Li, Y., Lundberg, S., Nori, H., Palangi, H., Ribeiro, M. T., & Zhang, Y. (2023). Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4 (arXiv:2303.12712). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.12712

  3. Keeter, S., & Christian, L. (2012). A Comparison of Results from Surveys by the Pew Research Center and Google Consumer Surveys. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2012/11/07/a-comparison-of-results-from-surveys-by-the-pew-research-center-and-google-consumer-surveys/

  4. Lam, S. Y., Chiang, J., & Parasuraman, A. (2008). The effects of the dimensions of technology readiness on technology acceptance: An empirical analysis. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 22(4), 19–39.

  5. Marcus, G. (2022, July 1). Artificial General Intelligence Is Not as Imminent as You Might Think. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/artificial-general-intelligence-is-not-as-imminent-as-you-might-think1/

  6. O’Shaughnessy, M. R., Schiff, D. S., Varshney, L. R., Rozell, C. J., & Davenport, M. A. (2023). What governs attitudes toward artificial intelligence adoption and governance? Science and Public Policy, 50(2), 161–176.

  7. Prolific. (2014). https://www.prolific.co/academic-researchers

  8. Schepman, A., & Rodway, P. (2020). Initial validation of the general attitudes towards Artificial Intelligence Scale. Computers in Human Behavior Reports, 1, 100014.

  9. Sindermann, C., Sha, P., Zhou, M., Wernicke, J., Schmitt, H. S., Li, M., Sariyska, R., Stavrou, M., Becker, B., & Montag, C. (2021). Assessing the attitude towards artificial intelligence: Introduction of a short measure in German, Chinese, and English language. KI-Künstliche Intelligenz, 35, 109–118.

  10. Sostek, K., & Slatkin, B. (2017). How Google Surveys Works. http://g.co/surveyswhitepaper

  11. Yudkowsky, E. (2023, March 29). Pausing AI Developments Isn’t Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down. Time. https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/

    Zhang, B., & Dafoe, A. (2019). Artificial intelligence: American attitudes and trends. Available at SSRN 3312874.