"War. Climate change. Unemployment. Against these headline-dominating issues, AI still feels like a gimmick to many. Yet experts warn that AI will reshape all of these issues and more - to say nothing of potential changes to our work and relationships. The question is: do people see the connection? What will make them care?
This research is the first large-scale effort to answer those questions. We polled 10,000 people across the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, and Poland to understand how AI fits into their broader hopes and fears for the future
(...)
The truth is that people are concerned that AI will worsen almost everything about their daily lives, from relationships and mental health to employment and democracy. They’re not concerned about “AI” as a concept; they’re concerned about what it will do to the things they already care about most.
(...)
People continue to rank AI low in their list of overall concerns. But we have discovered that there is a strong latent worry about AI risks, because people believe AI will make almost everything they care about worse.
This concern is not even. Rather, it plays into existing societal divisions, with women, lower-income and minority respondents most concerned about AI risks.
When it comes to what we worry about when we worry about AI, we have found that concern to be evolving rapidly. People worry most about relationships, more even than about their jobs.
People don't perceive AI as a catastrophic risk like war or climate change; though 1 in 3 are worried that AI might pursue its own goals outside our control, this is actually a lower proportion than
some surveys found for the same question two years ago.
Instead, our respondents see AI as a pervasive influence that modifies risk in a host of other areas, with concern about specific harms on the rise."
https://report2025.seismic.org/
