FOR RELEASE June 16, 2021 Experts Doubt Ethical AI Design Will Be Broadly Adopted as the Norm Within the Next Decade A majority worries that the evolution of artificial intelligence by 2030 will continue to be primarily focused on optimizing profits and social control. They also cite the difficulty of achieving consensus about ethics. Many who expect progress say it is not likely within the next decade. Still, a portion celebrate coming AI breakthroughs that will improve life BY Lee Rainie, Janna Anderson and Emily A. Vogels FOR MEDIA OR OTHER INQUIRIES: Lee Rainie, Director, Internet and Technology Research Janna Anderson, Director, Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center Haley Nolan, Communications Associate 202.419.4372 www.pewresearch.org RECOMMENDED CITATION Pew Research Center, June 16, 2021. “Experts Doubt Ethical AI Design Will Be Broadly Adopted as the Norm in the Next Decade” 1 PEW RESEARCH CENTER About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world. It does not take policy positions. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, content analysis and other data-driven social science research. The Center studies U.S. politics and policy; journalism and media; internet, science and technology; religion and public life; Hispanic trends; global attitudes and trends; and U.S. social and demographic trends. All of the center’s reports are available at www.pewresearch.org. Pew Research Center is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts, its primary funder. For this project, Pew Research Center worked with Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center, which helped conceive the research and collect and analyze the data. © Pew Research Center 2021 www.pewresearch.org 2 PEW RESEARCH CENTER How we did this This is the 12th “Future of the Internet” canvassing Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center have conducted together to get expert views about important digital issues. In this case, the questions focused on the prospects for ethical artificial intelligence (AI) by the year 2030. This is a nonscientific canvassing based on a nonrandom sample; this broad array of opinions about where current trends may lead in the next decade represents only the points of view of the individuals who responded to the queries. Pew Research and Elon’s Imagining the Internet Center built a database of experts to canvass from a wide range of fields, choosing to invite people from several sectors, including professionals and policy people based in government bodies, nonprofits and foundations, technology businesses, think tanks and in networks of interested academics and technology innovators. The predictions reported here came in response to a set of questions in an online canvassing conducted between June 30 and July 27, 2020. In all, 602 technology innovators and developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists responded to at least one of the questions covered in this report. More on the methodology underlying this canvassing and the participants can be found in the final section. www.pewresearch.org 3 PEW RESEARCH CENTER Experts Doubt Ethical AI Design Will Be Broadly Adopted as the Norm Within the Next Decade A majority worries that the evolution of artificial intelligence by 2030 will continue to be primarily focused on optimizing profits and social control. They also cite the difficulty of achieving consensus about ethics. Many who expect progress say it is not likely within the next decade. Still, a portion celebrate coming AI breakthroughs that will improve life Artificial intelligence systems “understand” and shape a lot of what happens in people’s lives. AI applications “speak” to people and answer questions when the name of a digital voice assistant is called out. They run the chatbots that handle customer-service issues people have with companies. They help diagnose cancer and other medical conditions. They scour the use of credit cards for signs of fraud, and they determine who could be a credit risk. They help people drive from point A to point B and update traffic information to shorten travel times. They are the operating system of driverless vehicles. They sift applications to make recommendations about job candidates. They determine the material that is offered up in people’s newsfeeds and video choices. They recognize people’s faces, translate languages and suggest how to complete people’s sentences or search queries. They can “read” people’s emotions. They beat them at sophisticated games. They write news stories, paint in the style of Vincent Van Gogh and create music that sounds quite like the Beatles and Bach. Corporations and governments are charging evermore expansively into AI development. Increasingly, nonprogrammers can set up off-the-shelf, pre-built AI tools as they prefer. As this unfolds, a number of experts and advocates around the world have become worried about the long-term impact and implications of AI applications. They have concerns about how advances in AI will affect what it means to be human, to be productive and to exercise free will. Dozens of convenings and study groups have issued papers proposing what the tenets of ethical AI design should be, and government working teams have tried to address these issues. In light of this, Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center asked experts where they thought efforts aimed at creating ethical artificial intelligence would stand in the year 2030. Some 602 technology innovators, developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists responded to this specific question: www.pewresearch.org 4 PEW RESEARCH CENTER By 2030, will most of the AI systems being used by organizations of all sorts employ ethical principles focused primarily on the public good? In response, 68% chose the option declaring that ethical principles focused primarily on the public good will not be employed in most AI systems by 2030; 32% chose the option positing that ethical principles focused primarily on the public good will be employed in most AI systems by 2030. This is a nonscientific canvassing, based on a nonrandom sample. The results represent only the opinions of the individuals who responded to the queries and are not projectable to any other population. The bulk of this report covers these experts’ written answers explaining their responses. They sounded many broad themes about the ways in which individuals and groups are accommodating to adjusting to AI systems. It is important to note that the responses were gathered in the summer of 2020 in a different cultural context amid the pandemic, before COVID-19 vaccines had been approved, at a time when racial justice issues were particularly prominent in the U.S. and before the conclusion of the U.S. presidential election. In addition, these responses came prior to the most recent studies aimed at addressing issues in ethical AI design and development. For instance, in early 2021 the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence released an updated AI Index Report, the IEEE deepened its focus on setting standards for AI systems and the U.S. National Security Commission on AI, headed by tech leaders including Eric Schmidt, Andy Jassy, Eric Horvitz, Katharina McFarland and Robert Work, released its massive report on accelerating innovation while defending against malign uses of AI. The key themes these experts voiced in the written elaborations explaining their choices are outlined in the accompanying tables. Worries: The main developers and deployers of AI are focused on profit-seeking and social control, and there is no consensus about what ethical AI would look like Even as global attention turns to the purpose and impact of artificial intelligence (AI), many experts worry that ethical behaviors and outcomes are hard to define, implement and enforce. They point out that the AI ecosystem is dominated by competing businesses seeking to maximize profits and by governments seeking to surveil and control their populations. www.pewresearch.org 5 PEW RESEARCH CENTER • It is difficult to define “ethical” AI: Context matters. There are cultural differences, and the nature and power of the actors in any given scenario are crucial. Norms and standards are currently under discussion, but global consensus may not be likely. In addition, formal ethics training and emphasis is not embedded in the human systems creating AI. • Control of AI is concentrated in the hands of powerful companies and governments driven by motives other than ethical concerns: Over the next decade, AI development will continue to be aimed at finding ever-more- sophisticated ways to exert influence over people’s emotions and beliefs in order to convince them to buy goods, services and ideas. • The AI genie is already out of the bottle, abuses are already occurring, and some are not very visible and hard to remedy: AI applications are already at work in “black box” systems that are opaque at best and, at worst, impossible to dissect. How can ethical standards be applied under these conditions? While history has shown that when abuses arise as new tools are introduced societies always adjust and work to find remedies, this time it’s different. AI is a major threat. • Global competition, especially between China and the U.S., will matter more to the development of AI than any ethical issues: There is an arms race between the two tech superpowers that overshadows concerns about ethics. Plus, the two countries define ethics in different ways. The acquisition of techno-power is the real impetus for advancing AI systems. Ethics takes a back seat. Source: Nonscientific canvassing of select experts conducted June 30-July 27, 2020. “Experts Doubt Ethical AI Design Will Be Broadly Adopted as the Norm in the Next Decade” PEW RESEARCH CENTER and ELON UNIVERSITY’S IMAGINING THE INTERNET CENTER, 2021 Hopes: Progress is being made as AI spreads and shows its value; societies have always found ways to mitigate the problems arising from technological evolution Artificial intelligence (AI) applications are already doing amazing things.