U.S. Public Opinion on the Governance of Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) has widespread societal implications, yet social scientists are only beginning to study public attitudes toward the technology. Existing studies find that the public's trust in institutions can play a major role in shaping the regulation of emerging technologies. Using a large-scale survey (N =2000), we examined Americans' perceptions of 13 AI governance challenges as well as their trust in governmental, corporate, and multistakeholder institutions to responsibly develop and manage AI. While Americans perceive all of the AI governance issues to be important for tech companies and governments to manage, they have only low to moderate trust in these institutions to manage AI applications.

Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence: Evidence from a Survey of Machine Learning Researchers

“…For some questions, we compare responses from this survey with those from the US public. This public opinion data come from a representative national survey of 2,000 US adults conducted in 2018, in which similar questions were asked (Zhang & Dafoe, 2020). 1 Our analysis is pre-registered using the Open Science Framework.…”

“…To examine these researchers' views, we conducted a survey of those who published in two top AI/ML conferences (N = 524). We compare these results with those from a 2016 survey of AI/ML researchers (Grace et al, 2018) and a 2018 survey of the US public (Zhang & Dafoe, 2020). We find that AI/ML researchers place high levels of trust in international organizations and scientific organizations to shape the development and use of AI in the public interest; moderate trust in most Western tech companies; and low trust in national militaries, Chinese tech companies, and Facebook.…”

“…The scale ranged from 0 "not at all important" to 3 "very important." 4 Figure 1 shows the mean importance of AI governance challenges, along with the corresponding 95% confidence interval for both AI/ML researchers and the general public (Zhang & Dafoe, 2020). For the AI/ML researcher group, almost all issues were rated as having a mean importance of around 2.5, between "somewhat important" and "very important," with the top five issues including preventing criminal justice bias, ensuring autonomous vehicles are safe, preventing critical AI system failure, protecting data privacy, and preventing mass surveillance.…”

“…Past survey research related to AI tends to focus on specific governance challenges, such as lethal autonomous weapons (Horowitz, 2016), algorithmic fairness (Saxena et al, 2019), or facial recognition technology (Smith, 2019;Ada Lovelace Institute, 2019). A few largescale surveys have taken a more comprehensive approach by asking about a range of AI governance challenges (Eurobarometer, 2017;Smith & Anderson, 2016;Smith, 2018;West, 2018;Cave et al, 2019;Eurobarometer, 2019;Zhang & Dafoe, 2020;European Commission, 2020;Balaram et al, 2018). While previous work has compared the public's and AI/ML researchers' forecast of AI development timelines (Walsh, 2018;Zhang & Dafoe, 2019), little work compares the attitudes of AI/ML researchers and the public toward AI governance.…”

Current Challenges and Barriers to Real-World Artificial Intelligence Adoption for the Healthcare System, Provider, and the Patient

“…A recent survey in the United States on AI indicates that data privacy is considered the most important issue when thinking about this technology. 12 How the ophthalmic community and healthcare industry implement AI may play a significant role in the patient's perceptions. For example, the implementation of AI at a physician's office versus a local drugstore may impact a patient's willingness to use this technology.…”