3 Public opinion on AI governance

3.1 Americans consider many AI governance challenges to be important; prioritize data privacy and preventing AI-enhanced cyber attacks, surveillance, and digital manipulation We sought to understand how Americans prioritize policy issues associated with AI. Respondents were asked to consider five AI governance challenges, randomly selected from a test of 13 (see Appendix B for the text); the order these five were to each respondent was also randomized. After considering each governance challenge, respondents were asked how likely they think the challenge will affect large numbers of people 1) in the U.S. and 2) around the world within 10 years. We use scatterplots to visualize our survey results. In Figure 3.1, the x-axis is the perceived likelihood of the problem happening to large numbers of people in the U.S. In Figure 3.2, the x-axis is the perceived likelihood of the problem happening to large numbers of people around the world. The y-axes on both Figure 3.1 and 3.2 represent respondents’ perceived issue importance, from 0 (not at all important) to 3 (very important). Each dot represents the mean perceived likelihood and issue importance, and the correspondent ellipse represents the 95% bivariate confidence region. Americans consider all the AI governance challenges we present to be important: the mean perceived issues importance of each governance challenge is between “somewhat important” (2) and “very important” (3), though there is meaningful and discernible variation across items. The AI governance challenges Americans think are most likely to impact large numbers of people, and are important for tech companies and governments to tackle, are found in the upper-right quadrant of the two plots. These issues include data privacy as well as AI-enhanced cyber attacks, surveillance, and digital manipulation. We note that the media have widely covered these issues during the time of the survey. There are a second set of governance challenges that are perceived on average, as about 7% less likely, and marginally less important. These include autonomous vehicles, value alignment, bias in using AI for hiring, the U.S.-China arms race, disease diagnosis, and technological unemployment. Finally, the third set of challenges are perceived on average another 5% less likely, and about equally important, including criminal justice bias and critical AI systems failures. We also note that Americans predict that all of the governance challenges mentioned in the survey, besides protecting data privacy and ensuring the safety of autonomous vehicles, are more likely to impact people around the world than to affect people in the U.S. While most of the statistically significant differences are substantively small, one difference stands out: Americans think that autonomous weapons are 7.6 percentage points more likely to impact people around the world than Americans. (See Appendix C for details of these additional analyses.) We want to reflect on one result. “Value alignment” consists of an abstract description of alignment problem and a reference to what sounds like individual level harms: “while performing jobs [they could] unintentionally make decisions that go against the values of its human users, such as physically harming people.” “Critical AI systems failures,” by contrast, references military or critical infrastructure uses, and unintentional accidents leading to “10 percent or more of all humans to die.” The latter was weighted as less important than the former: we interpret this as a probability weighted assessment of importance, since presumably the latter, were it to happen, is much more important. We thus think the issue importance question should be interpreted in a way that down-weights low probability risks. This perspective also plausibly applies to the “impact” measure for our global risks analysis, which placed “harmful consequences of synthetic biology” and “failure to address climate change” as less impactful than most other risks.

3.2 Americans who are younger, who have CS or engineering degrees express less concern about AI governance challenges We performed further analysis by calculating the percentage of respondents in each subgroup who consider each governance challenge to be “very important” for governments and tech companies to manage. (See Appendix C for additional data visualizations.) In general, differences in responses are more salient across demographic subgroups than across governance challenges. In a linear multiple regression predicting perceived issue importance using demographic subgroups, governance challenges, and the interaction between the two, we find that the stronger predictors are demographic subgroup variables, including age group and having CS or programming experience. Two highly visible patterns emerge from our data visualization. First, a higher percentage of older respondents, compared with younger respondents, consider nearly all AI governance challenges to be “very important.” As discussed previously, we find that older Americans, compared with younger Americans, are less supportive of developing AI. Our results here might explain this age gap: older Americans see each AI governance challenge as substantially more important than do younger Americans. Whereas 85% of Americans older than 73 consider each of these issues to be very important, only 40% of Americans younger than 38 do. Second, those with CS or engineering degrees, compared with those who do not, rate all AI governance challenges as less important. This result could explain our previous finding that those with CS or engineering degrees tend to exhibit greater support for developing AI.