24% of the US public is now aware of AI xrisk

otto.barten

The Existential Risk Observatory has been interested in public awareness of AI existential risk since its inception over five years ago. We started surveying public awareness in December 2022, including by asking the following open question:

"Please list three events, in order of probability (from most to least probable), that you believe could potentially cause human extinction within the next 100 years."

If respondents would include AI or similar terms in their top-3 extinction risks ("robots" or "computers" count, "technology" doesn't), we counted them as aware, if not, as unaware. The aim of this methodology was to see how many people would spontaneously, without getting led by the question, connect the concepts of human extinction and AI. We used Prolific to find participants, n=300, and we only included US inhabitants over eightteen years old and fluent in English.

In the four surveys we ran, we obtained 7% (Dec '22), 12% (Apr '23), 15% (Apr '24), and, today, 24%. In a graph, that looks like this.

Frankly, I think ours is a rough measurement method. From participants' answers to our open questions, we see that not every participant takes all our questions seriously, and that some answers are obviously self-inconsistent. Therefore, I don't think the 24% by itself is a very meaningful number. I do however think our results say a few things:

AI existential risk awareness is robustly rising among the general public.
An appreciable minority of the public is concerned about AI existential risk.
We're not there yet: for regulation specifically geared towards reduction of AI extinction risk (as opposed to, for example, job loss), a majority is still unlikely.

In both this survey and past studies, we found that those who are aware, and even part of those who are unaware, often support far-reaching regulation such as a government-mandated pause.

If one is interested in the data, do reach out.

This question seems deeply flawed.

Participants may be aware of AI existential risk claims but consider other xrisks more likely
"Top 3" might correspond to wildly different assessments of the likelihood of an existential that, based on a participant's overall priors for extinction. Comparing rankings doesn't give much information on risk assessment

I agree with these two points, but I doubt either will have significant impact.

Human extinction is seen as extremely unlikely, almost absurd. While there are obviously many other public concerns, three other significant human extinction concerns are very rare.

We also asked for people's extinction probability, but then many would just give a number (sometimes high), even if they didn't see the existential risk of AI at all. Still, trends in both methodologies were usually similar.

I'm open to better methodologies, but I think this is a fair way of assessing public xrisk awareness, and a better way than asking explicit probabilities.

I believe there's a line from the Art of War^[1] that translates loosely to "know victory," as in "be able to identify it when it occurs, and distinguish it from defeat."

Like much of the book, the advice seems so obvious that it's silly to state until you see someone making precisely the mistake warned against. If your goal is raising awareness of the risk of AI causing human extinction (or some comparable catastrophe), having a quarter (!!) of the US public list it in their top three reasons means it's just about accomplished.

^{^}
This is from memory. It's possible the quotation is spurious.