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2 in 3 Americans think AI will cause major harm to humans in the next 20 years [pdf] (2024)
- akersten 10mo agoClose to 2/3 Americans also believe in magic so I'm not sure what these studies are supposed to tell us.
- hackyhacky 10mo ago> Close to 2/3 Americans also believe in magic so I'm not sure what these studies are supposed to tell us. I think you're missing the point, as are many other comments on this post saying effectively, "These people don't even understand how AI works, so they can't make good predictions!" It's true that most people can't make accurate predictions about AI, but this study is interesting because it represents people's current opinion, not future fact. Right now, people are already distrustful of AI. This means that if you want people to adapt it, you need to persuade them otherwise. So far, most people's interactions with AI are limited to cheesy fake internet videos, deceptive memes, and the risk of shrinking labor demand. In its short tenure in the public sphere, large language models have contributed nothing positive, except for (a) senior coders who can offload part of their job to Claude, and (b) managers, who can cut their workforce. Why would people hold AI in high esteem?
- skeledrew 10mo ago> risk of shrinking labor demand Yet this is a primary goal of AI. Problem is that the way how the dominant economic system is structured, reduction of said demand increasingly leads to a societal crash.
- giardini 10mo agohackyhacky says >"...most people can't make accurate predictions about AI..."< "...no one can make accurate predictions about AI..." FTFY
- therobots927 10mo agoIncluding many people in Silicon Valley. Apparently you’re not familiar with Nick Land.
- nunez 10mo agoThe responses to the rest of the questions in the survey indicate (to me) that sentiments on AI, which is forced onto people more often than not, are largely negative.
- Kenji 10mo ago[dead]
- andy99 10mo agoInteresting that it looks like News and Elections were where people thought AI would have the most negative impact. I’d consider it to be almost inconsequential for both, compared with stuff like employment and customer service - including government and healthcare - which I expect to be a dystopian nightmare.
- embedding-shape 10mo ago"News and Elections" let you influence large swaths of the population. A shitty customer service bot that can't give a good answer wouldn't influence anyone besides "Now I understand what Rage Against The Machine was all about", but it's not gonna make "un-electable" people suddenly presidents, compared to what you can do with a influence campaign on social media.
- epistasis 10mo agoHere's why I think AI has the potential to absolutely destroy news and elections: The wave of fake content will only get better and look more real over time, causing even larger amounts of false belief, but perhaps even more worryingly, a grand break down in trust overall. This will funnel people into having deeper trust for their sources, and less trust of sources they don't know. The end result will be even greater control of people's information sphere by a few people who shape those trusted channels, separating people from reliable news and information about the world. This will be disastrous for democracy, as democracy depends on voters being able to make decisions on reliable true information. I don't know if this will come to pass, but the above narrative seems highly probable based on what we have see so far with social media, especially video-driven social media.
- alasdair_ 10mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Anyone_Builds_It,_Everyone_Dies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Anyone_Builds_It,_Everyone_...
- AlexErrant 10mo agoThis is a deeply unserious book. It gives no concrete outline that leads to extinction. I agree with the overall premise that IFF we give inscrutable black boxes the ability to self-replicate, build their own data centers, and generate their own power, we're doomed. However, I see no hint that people (or governments) will give black boxes complete autonomy with no safeguards or kill switches. Frankly, if we give black boxes the ability to manipulate atoms with no oversight, we _deserve_ to go extinct. The first thing we should do if we achieve AGI is to take it apart to see how it works (to make it safe). I believe that's one of the first things a frontier lab will do because it's our nature as curious monkeys.
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago> Frankly, if we give black boxes the ability to manipulate atoms with no oversight, we _deserve_ to go extinct. Well we are giving them ability to manipulate all aspects of a computer (aka giving them computer access) and we all know how that went (Spoiler or maybe not so much spoiler for those who know but NOT GOOD) For the unitiated, Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46392115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46392115 and Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop "act of kindness : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46394867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46394867
- AlexErrant 10mo agoHm, perhaps I was unclear. AI absolutely is capable of doing damage, and _is_ currently doing damage. Perpetuating inequality, generating fake news, violation of privacy, questionable IP/rights, etc. These are more pressing than the idea that someday we will give AI the ability to manufacture nano-mosquitos that will poison us all, as Yudkowsky suggested on a recent podcast. He's so busy fantasizing about scifi he's lost touch with the damage it's currently doing.
- belter 10mo ago1 in 3 thinks AI is the intern...
- ls612 10mo agoPeople on this forum should definitely be concerned about the techlash coming for data centers, I doubt many here would enjoy a future where compute follows the same trend as housing prices because it’s illegal to build more of either.
- captainkrtek 10mo agoAgreed, seen a number of short form news pieces / docs on the effects of datacenter development across different parts of America. Pollution, noise, lights, water impacts, energy costs, etc. not a lot to like from them, and they create very few jobs in relation to the community.
- machinationu 10mo agoAI data centers will be the job destroyers, not creators. 100 local people to maintain the data center while it replaces 1 million people with the AIs running inside
- rileymat2 10mo agoIf we can deal with the personal economics of the transition, isn’t freeing up human capital to do something else a good thing?
- watwut 10mo agoThe upper class who holds all the power does not want people to have good life. They want to extract as much as possible from most of us. So, no, because said human capital is holding shorter end of the stick and will be worst off.
- lanyard-textile 10mo agoYes, unfortunately we cannot deal with the personal economics of such a transition :)
- timmytokyo 10mo ago
- cm2012 10mo agoOne thing I like about AI tech is that the developing world is really eager to adopt it and many use cases are free or affordable to them. My assistant in the phillipines has used it to substantially improve her communications, for instance. Its much less popular in the USA and EU, but thats nice since it gives the developing world a chance to catch up.
- embedding-shape 10mo ago> many use cases are free or affordable to them Because the technology is so fast, efficient and easy to run locally themselves? Or because currently there are remote APIs/UIs that are heavily subsidized by VC money yet the companies behind them are yet to be profitable? I agree that giving the developing world any ladders for catching up is a great thing, but I'm not sure this is that, it just happens to be that companies don't care about profit (yet) so things appear "free or affordable" to them, and when its gonna be time to make things realistic, we'll see how accessible it'll still be.
- ls612 10mo agoInference is probably profitable in a unit economics sense today, there have been multiple back of the envelope calculations this year talking about this. And with multiple high quality open weights models out there I see no reason why competition between hosting providers won't drive price towards marginal cost of inference.
- embedding-shape 10mo agoSounds sensible, and I agree. But even with you and me making those assumptions/guesses, I still wouldn't claim that current AI tech is making it "free or affordable to them", it's subsidized, cannot really make claims about how affordable or not it is, at least not yet.
- lukeschlather 10mo agoWe can be pretty confident that these services are not subsidized. There are dozens of companies offering these services. Pretty much every single company has published open-weights models that you can run yourself. These open models, you could make money selling them for the same prices Google Gemini costs, while renting on-demand GPU instances from Google Cloud. It actually seems very implausible that Google is losing money on their proprietary models hosted on their own infrastructure. And OpenAI knows they have to compete with Google, which owns its own chips, OpenAI isn't going to be selling things at a loss. They cannot win that fight no matter how much Saudi money they get.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- gmuslera 10mo agoGuns too. But we are missing the elephant in the room here: humans using them, specially the ones in key places of power.
- xantronix 10mo agoIt's very unfortunate that, in the current moment, AI is the spear tip of one of the largest consolidations of power, at the combined annex of capital and political wealth, in recent history.
- Throaway198712 10mo agothat argument helps a lot when someone is pointing a gun at you /s
- hk1337 10mo agoI'm not so sure that AI will cause major harm as much as the AI fixation some people have to implement it.
- joquarky 10mo agoIt's the do-gooders who we should most fear will press the big shiny world-ending button.
- alistairSH 10mo agoIt’s already doing a piss-poor job dealing with suicidal teenagers. Is there any reason to believe AI will be any better than social media when it comes to mental health? https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/12/27/chatgpt-suicide-openai-raine/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/12/27/chatgpt...
- eastbound 10mo agoYes. It pulls people towards normality, since it gives the average words for every answer. Meanwhile social media encouraged people to be different enough to surface, and therefore encouraged abnormality.
- watwut 10mo agoIt will happily validate you toward any deep hole or extreme you want to. It is as bad or even worst then social media in that regard.
- alistairSH 10mo agoTry reading the article. ChatGPT did no such thing.
- mgraczyk 10mo agoIt's not true in any sense that LLMs "give the average words for every answer"
- embedding-shape 10mo agoIt's a over-simplification, that's for sure, one bordering on incorrect. But for people who don't care about the internals, I don't think it's a harmful perspective to keep.
- mgraczyk 10mo agoIt's harmful because in this context it leads to an incorrect conclusion. There's no reason to believe that LLMs "averaging" behavior would cause a suicidal person to be "pulled toward normal"
- throw-12-16 10mo agojust absolve the people building them of any responsibility
- rcy 10mo agoai doesn't kill people, ai companies kill people
- hk1337 10mo agoThat's their 5th amendment rights.
- embedding-shape 10mo agoWell, in this case, I think since people are killing themselves after talking to the AI, people are actually killing people. The AI company and the AI kills no one, so surely they must not be responsible at all for this.
- dijksterhuis 10mo ago“responsibility” isn’t a boolean, at least in this human’s experience. there are different degrees of responsibility (and accountability) for everyone involved. some are smaller, some are larger. but everyone shares some responsibility, even if it is infinitesimally small.
- embedding-shape 10mo agoWould you say an AI researcher involved in LLMs today are as responsible for how AI is being deployed, as the developers/engineers who initially worked on TCP and HTTP are for the state of the internet and web is today? I don't have any good answer myself, but eager to hear what others think.
- dijksterhuis 10mo agoit’s not for me to judge someone else’s degree of responsibility really, that’s up to each individual to do for themselves.
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo agoA quick search shows me (Disclosure: I think it is the duck.ai search thing rather than any article) > TCP and HTTP protocols were primarily developed with funding and support from government agencies, particularly the U.S. Department of Defense and organizations like ARPA, rather than by non-profit entities. These protocols were created to facilitate communication across different computer networks So um... yea?
- chuckadams 10mo agoI think the job of causing major harm to humanity is still safely in the hands of humans for a while yet.
- atomic128 10mo agoPoison Fountain: https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/ https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/
- Mistletoe 10mo agoI used to believe in stuff like this, but I really don't now. AI is a tool. Imagine if we poisoned all the encyclopedias in the past where we would be. “All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.” -Edward Gibbon
- silexia 10mo agoAI is not a tool. It is a new species being created before our eyes that will likely lead to the extinction of the human species and many others.
- ndsipa_pomu 10mo agoSo, who else is waiting for the Butlerian Jihad? However, I don't think we're going to have to wait 11,000 years for it
- kingofmen 10mo agoNeither did the jihadists. The Jihad occurs 10000 years before the events of Dune, which is set approximately 12k years AD. So... any year now.
- MontyCarloHall 10mo agoDoesn't Dune take place in ~22k AD? Wiki says "the Butlerian Jihad is a conflict taking place over 11,000 years in the future (and over 10,000 years before the events of Dune)." [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(franchise)#Butlerian_Jihad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(franchise)#Butlerian_Jih...
- kingofmen 10mo agoThen I guess I misremembered. :shrug:
- z3ugma 10mo agoand yet: When you ask an AI like ChatGPT a question, what is it actually doing? Survey of 2,301 American adults (August 1-6, 2025) - Looking up the exact answer in a database: 45% - Predicting what words come next based on learned patterns: 28% - Running a script full of prewritten chat responses: 21% - Having a human in the background write an answer: 6% Source: Searchlight Institute most survey respondents don't even _understand_ what AI is doing, so I am a bit skeptical to trust their opinions on whether it will cause harm
- tptacek 10mo agoI'm fond of pointing out that in the 1980s, people raised the same kinds of alarms about databases.
- moron4hire 10mo agoYou seem to be raising this as a "just so" kind of argument and absurdum, but we have extant examples of databases and information technology enabling villainy like oppression and genocide by making correlations easier to track, making tracking more efficient, and less cost prohibitive.
- tptacek 10mo agoIt's a pity we never regulated MySQL. The good we could have done!
- shimman 10mo agoWe absolutely should, some companies cannot ever be trusted with certain information. There is no reason why companies like Meta or Google should be entrusted with so much user data. The government should force a divestment from it and allow the public to own it (which should include public job guarantees that allow the public to maintain said data) or allow for smaller companies to be the handlers of such data. Google, Meta, and the rest of big tech have proven they should never be trusted.
- 10mo ago
- kingofmen 10mo agoHow many of them believe that copyright infringement and job loss are "major harms"? How many believe that data centers put a Great Lake through their cooling system daily? Polls like this are meaningless.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- amelius 10mo agoThe problem with the US is that it is a casino society. Those who win the casino game will do well, and serve as poster material. Survivorship bias is at an all time high. The less fortunate, even those who work hard, will suffer. This will only get worse with AI.
- Waterluvian 10mo ago> Casino society The other day I read that Americans have a lottery jackpot in the BILLIONS of dollars. I’m not sure how to really put to words what I feel about that. Something is very, very wrong there.
- sokoloff 10mo agoSub $1B cash value. Several hundred million after taxes. Dramatically life-changing for sure, but not even a single billion pre-tax, let alone plural.
- Waterluvian 10mo agoWhich has absolutely zero impact on how incredibly broken it makes that culture appear. It’s just breathtakingly screwed up. And even the “well actually it’s more like $900 million” speaks volumes. That doesn’t actually change a thing.
- llbbdd 10mo agoWhich number would make you more comfortable?
- Waterluvian 10mo ago$38,433,902.11
- giardini 10mo agoI know of no one who is willing to work hard having a bad life other than for extremely bad luck, drugs or gambling. This is anecdotal certainly but I see nothing to discourage people from working hard.
- black_13 10mo ago[dead]
- Papazsazsa 10mo ago"Tech" as a cohort is ideologically committed to one thing: minimum input with maximum quantifiable output (engagement, users, money). This works brilliantly in zero-sum competitions: markets, war, politics. But here's the problem: societies aren't built on pure functionality. They're built on intangibles. Morals, aesthetics, the experience of meaning itself. These resist quantification to such a degree that homo sapiens has devoted centuries to exploring the intangibles: religion, philosophy, art (which have also been used as exploitation mechanisms, to be fair). When you encounter Guernica [1] you're not processing a JPEG. You're standing before a distillation of one man's entire aesthetic and moral project. You're being overwhelmed by scale, by historical weight, by the presence of something that matters in a way that eludes specification. That mattering is what tech cannot compute. The problem: tech culture has systematically reduced these intangibles to problems to be solved—UI patterns, conversion metrics, a marketing department tasked with fabricating the meaning the product itself cannot contain. Now companies are desperately hiring "storytellers" as patches. [2] I believe this is one of the underlying reasons there is FUD about AI, and I'm not aware of any AI researcher who has bothered to address the intangibles (which is a very telling, but I might be wrong) but see Albert Borgmann's 'device paradigm' and Hubert Dreyfus on embodied meaning. There's also "tech's" general attitude towards treating humans and their data like chattel for two decades. Try getting google tech support on the line some time. There is a ton of repair work (and opportunity!) for 'tech' to engage in good faith with people if it wants to reshape society. But this requires extraordinary grace, a rejection of bottom-line thinking, and good-faith efforts to engage on reasonable terms. When elites become so functionally detached from what actually sustains a civilization they stop being the ruling class and become illegitimate. History suggests what happens next [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_(Picasso) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_(Picasso) [2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-are-desperately-seeking-storytellers-7b79f54e https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-are-desperately-seeki... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution
- hn_throwaway_99 10mo agoHow about now? To be fair, I think that the biggest dangers of AI are just a continuation of the dangers of the Internet at large, namely the disintegration of a shared reality among society broadly. Echo chambers and personalization bubbles mean that everyone now is free to believe whatever they want to believe, and everyone else is crazy and wrong. AI just supercharges that, and especially makes it possible for the powers that be (i.e. owners of social media and communication channels) to subtly shift opinions in their favor. I believe that what we're witnessing is a fundamental breakdown in the human psyche's ability, as it evolved historically, to handle the modern world. There are 2 other areas that I think are good analogies: food abundance and birth control. Humans evolved to love sex, which, historically, also guaranteed lots of children. But with birth control, humans can now have sex without the consequence of children, and this is actually putting a huge new evolutionary pressure on humanity - lots of people aren't procreating, so those that do will markedly shift human evolution. Similarly, humans evolved in an environment where food scarcity was common, and our current overabundance of food causes all sorts of havoc in first world societies. Similarly, humans evolved socially to understand small groups, and then I would argue even larger and larger hierarchical groups. But the Internet, and AI, destroys those hierarchies, and is wreaking havoc on a society not prepared to deal with so many representations of "truth" where it is trivial to find an endless sea of people (or bots) who exactly agree with you.
- wat10000 10mo agoIt's hard to know what to make of a question like this. How did the respondents understand it, and what did the surveyors mean by it? It seems obvious to me that, if we take the question literally, this will definitely happen. Already has, really. It's a powerful tool. Powerful tools are used to do many things, including harmful things. Good, useful technology like fertilizers and computers have caused major harm to humans, this will be no different. As written, the question does not say anything about the harm outweighing the benefits. But I bet a lot of the people answering the question took that as implied.
- 0xbadcafebee 10mo agoClickbait title. Summary of findings: - High awareness, but the public is mostly uneasy while experts are more upbeat. Among U.S. adults, 40% say they’ve heard/read “a lot” about AI, and 51% say AI in daily life makes them more concerned than excited. In contrast, AI experts are far more positive: 47% are more excited than concerned. - Chatbots: about half have tried them, and most users find them helpful. 47% of U.S. adults say they’ve used an AI chatbot; among users, 79% rate them at least “somewhat helpful” (11% extremely, 22% very, 46% somewhat). - More Americans expect personal harm than benefit. When thinking about themselves, 43% say increased AI use is more likely to harm them than benefit them; 24% say it’s more likely to benefit them (33% not sure). - The dominant expectation is job loss (overall and in many specific occupations). 64% think AI will lead to fewer jobs in the U.S. over the next 20 years (5% more jobs). For specific occupations, majorities expect fewer jobs for cashiers (73%), factory workers (67%), software engineers (48%), and journalists (59%). - Trust is low for high-stakes decisions, and major concerns cluster around deception and privacy. 63% of U.S. adults say AI will not reach a point where they’d trust it to make important decisions for them (13% say it will). On risks, large shares are extremely/very concerned about AI being used to impersonate people (49%+29%), misuse personal information (40%+30%), and provide inaccurate information (34%+32%). - People feel they have little control over AI in their lives - and want more. Only 14% of U.S. adults say they have “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of control over whether AI is used in their life, while 55% say they’d like more control. AI experts similarly lean toward wanting more control (57%). - Most want more AI regulation. Experts report low confidence in regulators and companies. U.S. adults are much more likely to worry the U.S. government will not go far enough regulating AI (58%) than that it will go too far (21%). AI experts are similar on direction (56% not far enough), but express low confidence in execution - only 13% have “a great deal/quite a bit” of confidence in the U.S. government to regulate AI effectively, and 16% say the same about U.S. companies developing/using AI responsibly.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 10mo agoBlog post from April: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/03/how-the-us-public-and-ai-experts-view-artificial-intelligence/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/03/how-the-us-p...