Elon poll: Impact by AI on 12 core human capacities worsens by 2035

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(The Center Square) – Impact on the 12 core human capacities will be more negatively than positively in the next 10 years, says more than half of American adults in a survey released Wednesday by the Elon University Poll in conjunction with a report from the school’s Imagining the Digital Future Center.

In particular, social and emotional intelligence; empathy and moral judgment; capacity and willingness to think deeply about complex subjects; sense of individual agency; confidence in their own native abilities; and self-identity, meaning and purpose in life were named in the sampling of 1,005 Americans.

“These findings raise stark questions about the impact of AI on the essence of being human,” said Lee Rainie, director of Elon’s Imagining The Digital Future Center. “Americans expect the effect of AI will be more negative than not across each of the key human attributes we offered them. This is striking because it challenges the conventional notion that key human skills and social intelligences – sometimes called ‘soft skills’ – will be our saving grace as AI becomes more capable of matching or surpassing other kinds of basic intelligence. It’s now the case that the population fears that in the next decade AI could diminish many of the very qualities that make us uniquely human.”

Findings were presented in Durham at RTI International in a presentation called “The Human Edge: Our Future with Artificial Intelligence.” The 285-page report is known as “Being Human in 2035: How Are We Changing in the Age of AI?”

The impact of artificial intelligence, poll results said, will be more negative than positive:

• By 6 to 1 on social and emotional intelligence.

• By 49%-8% on empathy and moral judgment.

• By 53%-14% on capacity and willingness to think deeply about complex subjects.

• By 49%-11% on sense of individual agency.

• By 43%-17% on confidence in their own abilities.

• By 42%-9% on self-identity, meaning and purpose in life.

The report says, “Compared with experts, people expect more negative change in human curiosity and capacity to learn, people’s ability to exercise innovative thinking and creativity, decision-making and problem solving, and in their metacognition – the ability to think analytically about thinking.”

And it added with a note, “The public was more likely than the experts group to choose not to respond to some questions, because they were unsure and preferred not to guess.”

Respondents were sampled July 17-20, and the margin of error is +/- 3.5%.