Summary

Previous research from Rethink Priorities found that a majority of the population (59%) agreed with a statement from the Center for AI Safety (CAIS) that stated “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” 26% of the population disagreed with this statement. This research piece does further qualitative research to analyze this opposition in more depth.
The most commonly mentioned theme among those who disagreed with the CAIS statement was that other priorities were more important (mentioned by 36% of disagreeing respondents), with climate change particularly commonly mentioned.
- This theme was particularly strongly occurring among younger disagreeing respondents (43.3%) relative to older disagreeing respondents (27.8%).
The next most commonly mentioned theme was rejection of the idea that AI would cause extinction (23.4%), though some of these respondents agreed AI may pose other risks.
Another commonly mentioned theme was the idea that AI was not yet a threat, though it might be in the future.
- This was commonly co-occurring with the ‘Other priorities’ theme, with many arguing that other threats were more imminent.
Other less commonly mentioned themes included that AI would be under our control (8.8%) and so would not pose a threat, while another was that AI was not capable of causing harm, because it was not sentient or sophisticated or autonomous (5%).

Introduction

Our previous survey on attitudes on US public perception of the CAIS statement on AI risk found that a majority of Americans agree with the statement (59%), while a minority (26%) disagreed. To gain a better understanding of why individuals might disagree with the statement, we ran an additional survey, where we asked a new sample of respondents whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement, and then asked them to explain why they agreed or disagreed.^[1] We then coded the responses of those who disagreed with the statement to identify major recurring themes in people’s comments.^[2] We did not formally analyze comments from those who did not disagree with the statement, though may do so in a future report.

Since responses to this question might reflect responses to the specifics of the statement, rather than more general reactions to the idea of AI risk, i...

RP US Public AI Attitudes Surveys