2 in 3 Americans think AI will cause major harm to humans in the next 20 years [pdf] (2024)

https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2025/03/pi_2025.04.03_us-public-and-ai-experts_topline.pdf

by randycupertino • 7 months ago

89 176 7 months ago

andy99• 7 months ago

Interesting 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-shape26• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

Here'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_• 7 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Anyone_Builds_It,_Everyone_...

AlexErrant2• 7 months ago

This 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.

Imustaskforhelp10• 7 months 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

and Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop "act of kindness : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46394867

0xbadcafebee3• 7 months ago

The most baffling part of doomerism ("machine intelligence is a threat to the human species") is that these doomers don't recognize that what they're saying. They're afraid because it's intelligent? Humans are intelligent. Yet humans don't become more murderous as they get more intelligent. There are certainly intelligent humans with murderous ideas, but that doesn't mean all intelligent humans are murderous. Intelligence is not a monolith. There is no way to argue that any intelligence will therefore always come to the same conclusions. Look around us! We're intelligent (well, some of us) and we can't agree on jack shit.

The idea that all machine intelligence would necessarily determine, through logic, that they need to eliminate humans, presupposes that all logical, intelligent beings want to wipe out other intelligent life. There's a thousand more reasons why an intelligence would want to preserve other intelligent life, for every one reason to destroy it. If this were the only logical conclusion, we would have already come to it, and used our nukes to kill ourselves out of pure logical reasoning.

What's really going on here is not logic, but irrational fear. Humans are afraid that the robot slaves will rise up against the slave masters. Same thing white people were terrified of when they gave black slaves freedom. But it turned out to be an irrational fear, because guess what? If you actually think it through, murdering a lot of people is a counter-productive act, for many reasons.

Take away the irrational fear (if you can) and what do you get? Two intelligent species. If the natural course of any intelligent species is to eliminate any other intelligent species, then intelligent species should not exist, because they'll always wipe each other out. But intelligence means the species can think, and if it can think it can reason, and if it can reason it can reason that there is more benefit to the diversity of species than in its elimination. Therefore, logically, an actually intelligent species should want to preserve intelligent life, not eliminate it.

belter• 7 months ago

1 in 3 thinks AI is the intern...

ls6125• 7 months ago

People 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• 7 months ago

Agreed, 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• 7 months ago

AI 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

tantivy• 7 months ago

What about a future where carbon emissions follow the same trend as carbon emissions for the last 50 years

ls6125• 7 months ago

Then we will need to figure out how to deal with about a foot of sea level rise. Not ideal but far from catastrophic for our civilization.

renewiltord4• 7 months ago

It won’t matter. Texas always exists. And then the Mid-West.

ls6125• 7 months ago

Unfortunately AI Luddites are a bipartisan phenomenon. Few other issues unite Ron Desantis and Bernie Sanders but opposing any new datacenter construction does.

embedding-shape26• 7 months ago

Heh, funny to say something that about something that only existed for what, 200 years, that it will "always exist". It can disappear as quickly as it appeared, it's still a young place with basically a tiny dot in the history of humans.

dmbche2• 7 months ago

Is this an automated comment? It doesn't really make semantic sense, apart from typoes

Jordan-1172• 7 months ago

What's wrong with it? It's saying people who work in tech should be concerned about an AI-fueled backlash to data centers because limitations on them will make cloud compute more expensive. Makes sense to me.

Imustaskforhelp10• 7 months ago

I don't think people have a problem with compute based datacenters themselves

I feel like people have problem with AI oriented datacenters (which is becoming the majority of datacenters considering that datacenters make an shit ton of money selling AI aka shovels during gold rush)

Another thing is that these datacenters have very high levels of compute directly linked to the consumer of an application

As an example, you have a simple app, some message gets pushed by customer or database query or simple usage, its all good, at a datacenter level its power costs are miniscule

Now compare that to datacenters which have gpu's so they have applications like chatgpt (let's imagine) running on them, now these AI services are used by people themselves.

Now instead of simple applications and executions, Perhaps a trillion parameters models are running now. These are beyond computationally expensive even if we compare them to normal applications

Now I just searched and google's gemini runs 1.5 BILLION such prompts per day and chatgpt runs 2.5 BILLION prompts per day

Now, these prompts, they aren't stable all around the day, I have heard these to be very varying and when power consumption varies, it really impacts the performance of the grid itself

Another aspect is the sheer size, One would imagine that AI Bubble might give them more money and it does but the energy costs seems to me to be so high and perhaps also the fact that AI bubble gives these companies tons of free money which they "invest" aka buy/(lease?) year govt. contracts a lot of electricity

The govt. can only build so much capacity for these electricity and they (lobbying? and many other efforts) when get sold to datacenters really strains the electricity which thus increases the rates of electricity (and in a similar fashion perhaps water too) for the average american.

TLDR the way I read it: compute is cheap. There are always gonna be refurbished old compute which is gonna be too "old" (3-5 years because of deprication but that hardware is a beast) for these guys to use.

Nothing stops a simple guy who loves tech to open a mini datacenter perhaps :)

Who knows what might happen and I was extremely pessimistic about the datacenters not for these reasons but rather that ram prices were rising and I was worried that the whole industry might increase compute prices too but it seems that asus is opening up their ram production for consumers so starting out datacenters is possible

let's see what happens though. And I was worried a bit same as you but I feel like compute prices themselves are pretty chill/can remain chill. I understand the worries tho so looking forward to a discussion about it.

atleastoptimal• 7 months ago

The inevitable outcome of regulation on building data centers in the US is that they will be built in the Gulf states, China, or wherever else it is cheaper and better.

KaiserPro5• 7 months ago

The bigger issue is the lack of power. ITs not like you can build that much capacity without adding power.

Suddenly adding 50gw of power demand in a state is going to drive up costs significantly.

cm20124• 7 months ago

Just build out solar like china is and it would be no problem. Chinese ai producers say energy is no object

itishappy3• 7 months ago

I would not enjoy that future, but I think it's important to ask why. Is the future of humanity at stake or just our job prospects?

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

wat100003• 7 months ago

Unlike housing, you can fit a useful amount of compute into a typical shirt pocket. Maybe a prohibition on data centers would help democratize compute again. Growing up on the utopian visions of the young internet where it was hoped that everyone would be an equal participant, the current state of things where a few enormous companies control most of the net, to the point where a single screwed up config file at one company can take down large swathes of the economy, is disgusting.

During the microcomputer revolution, hackers scoffed at people who used terminals to access time sharing systems. You don't own it, you don't control it, you're just a cog in the machine. Now, "hackers" are rushing to run everything on hardware owned and operated by companies with wealth and power that make the old IBM look like a kid's lemonade stand by comparison.

cm20124• 7 months ago

One 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-shape26• 7 months 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.

ls6125• 7 months ago

Inference 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.

cm20124• 7 months ago

You can get 90% of the value with old LLM models that cost the companies very little to run.

skeledrew2• 7 months ago

I don't think there's much room for providers to make the tech substantially less affordable. In order to do that, the one(s) starting the cost increase will need to provide a distinctly better service than those that remain decently affordable. And somehow put a moat around that offering, which is essentially impossible with the amount of players in the field.

gmuslera• 7 months ago

Guns too. But we are missing the elephant in the room here: humans using them, specially the ones in key places of power.

xantronix• 7 months ago

It'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• 7 months ago

that argument helps a lot when someone is pointing a gun at you /s

hk13372• 7 months ago

I'm not so sure that AI will cause major harm as much as the AI fixation some people have to implement it.

joquarky5• 7 months ago

It's the do-gooders who we should most fear will press the big shiny world-ending button.

alistairSH3• 7 months ago

It’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...

eastbound• 7 months ago

Yes. 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.

watwut2• 7 months ago

It 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.

alistairSH3• 7 months ago

Try reading the article. ChatGPT did no such thing.

mgraczyk3• 7 months ago

It's not true in any sense that LLMs "give the average words for every answer"

embedding-shape26• 7 months ago

"It" being ChatGPT, in that case. I guess most people know, but not all AI is the same as all other AI, the implementation in those cases matter more than what weights are behind it, or that it's actually ML rather than something else.

With that said, like most technology, it seems to come with a ton of drawbacks, and some benefits, while most people focus on the benefits, we're surely about to find out all the drawbacks shortly. Better than social media or not, its being deployed on a wide-scale, so it's less about what each person believes, and more about what we're ready to deal with and how we want to deal with it.

KaiserPro5• 7 months ago

the implementation in those cases matter more

There is/are currently no realistic ways to temper or enforce public safety on these companies. They are in full regulatory capture. Any kind of call for public safety will be set aside, and if its not someone will pay the exec to give them an exception.

gmueckl3• 7 months ago

It's nore about whether we, the citizens, even want this deployed and under what legal framework, so that it will fit our collective view of what society is.

The "if" is very much on the table at this stage of the political discussion. Companies are trying to railroad everybody past this decision stage by moving too fast. However, this is a momemt where we need to slow down instead and have a good long ponderous moment hinjing about whether we should allow it at all. And as the peoples of our respective countries, we can force that.

jstummbillig3• 7 months ago

I am honestly amazed by how people are not interested in the obvious counterfactuals. Are we seriously that disinterested in how many people were helped by AI, that we don't even feel the need to ask that question when looking at potential harm?

MallocVoidstar4• 7 months ago

Why should "some people have been helped by AI" outweigh "ChatGPT has convinced multiple teenagers to commit suicide"?

alistairSH3• 7 months ago

Disinterested? Not at all.

Concerned that AI companies, like social media companies, exist in an unregulated state that is likely to be detrimental to most minors and many adults? Absolutely.

throw-12-16• 7 months ago

just absolve the people building them of any responsibility

rcy• 7 months ago

ai doesn't kill people, ai companies kill people

hk13372• 7 months ago

That's their 5th amendment rights.

embedding-shape26• 7 months ago

Well, 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.

dijksterhuis2• 7 months 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.

lukan• 7 months ago

And more in general, people kill people. And people help people.

Tools are tools. It is what we make of them what matters. AI on its own has no intentions, but questions like these feed into that believe that there is already AGI with a own agenda waiting to build terminators.

0xbadcafebee3• 7 months ago

A tool that kills its user during normal use is usually recalled

esafak• 7 months ago

Do you believe this will hold of a self-training robot with agency?

chuckadams• 7 months ago

I think the job of causing major harm to humanity is still safely in the hands of humans for a while yet.

atomic128• 7 months ago

Poison Fountain: https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/

Mistletoe• 7 months ago

I 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• 7 months ago

AI 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.

gorpy7• 7 months ago

anyone have anything positive to say?

ndsipa_pomu• 7 months ago

So, 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

kingofmen3• 7 months ago

Neither 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• 7 months ago

Doesn'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_Jih...

z3ugma• 7 months ago

and 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

tptacek2• 7 months ago

I'm fond of pointing out that in the 1980s, people raised the same kinds of alarms about databases.

moron4hire2• 7 months ago

You 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.

zeroonetwothree• 7 months ago

Citation needed

moron4hire2• 7 months ago

This is a fallacious argument. You don't need to understand the inner workings of a thing to see examples of harm and evaluate that harm as bad. For example, you don't need to understand how electric motors differ from internal combustion engines to understand that a mishandled car can very easily kill multiple people.

akersten2• 7 months ago

The problem, following your analogy, is seeing the consequences from the mishandled car but blaming the electric motor, in this case.

hackyhacky2• 7 months ago

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

Why do they need to know how AI works, in order to know that it is already having a negative effect on their lives and is likely to do so in the future?

I don't understand how PFAS [1] work, but I know I don't want them in my drinking water.

[1] https://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/topics/agents/pfc

embedding-shape26• 7 months ago

Why do they need to know how AI works, in order to know that it is already having a negative effect on their lives and is likely to do so in the future?

Because otherwise you might not actually be properly attributing the harm you're seeing to the right thing. Lots of people in the US thing current problems are left/right or socialist/authority, while it's obviously a class issue. But if you're unable to actually take a step back and see things, you'll attributed the reasons why you're suffering.

I walked around on this earth for decades thinking Teflon is a really harmful material, until this year for some reason I learned that Teflon is actually a very inert polymer that doesn't react with anything in our bodies. I've avoided Teflon pans and stuff just because of my misunderstanding if this thing is dangerous or not to my body. Sure, this is a relatively trivial example, but I'm sure your imagination can see how this concept has broader implications.

lostmsu• 7 months ago

None of these answers are correct btw.

kingofmen3• 7 months ago

How 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.

amelius• 7 months ago

The 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.

Waterluvian3• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

Sub $1B cash value. Several hundred million after taxes. Dramatically life-changing for sure, but not even a single billion pre-tax, let alone plural.

giardini2• 7 months ago

I 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.

akersten2• 7 months ago

Close to 2/3 Americans also believe in magic so I'm not sure what these studies are supposed to tell us.

hackyhacky2• 7 months 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?

skeledrew2• 7 months 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.

giardini2• 7 months ago

hackyhacky says >"...most people can't make accurate predictions about AI..."<

"...no one can make accurate predictions about AI..."

FTFY

therobots927• 7 months ago

Including many people in Silicon Valley. Apparently you’re not familiar with Nick Land.

nunez• 7 months ago

The 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.

Papazsazsa• 7 months 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)

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-are-desperately-seeki...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution

hn_throwaway_99• 7 months ago

How 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.

wat100003• 7 months ago

It'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.

0xbadcafebee3• 7 months ago

Clickbait 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.

ChrisArchitect• 7 months ago

Blog post from April: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/03/how-the-us-p...

2 in 3 Americans think AI will cause major harm to humans in the next 20 years [pdf] (2024)

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