Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

It's no surprise. The wild tech optimism of the 1990s and 2000s has completely fallen apart as time and time again tech companies have proved to be some of the most hostile actors in most American's lives. Perhaps edged out only by things such as actual violent crime and partisan hatred. (which itself, of course, is stoked to the absolute maximum in part due to technology trends in the past 15 years or so)

The loneliness epidemic, a constant drip-feed of outrage -- all so that people can make a small amount of money, distracted driving. Nearly every single service becoming worse over time, etc. Since then, the tech CEOs has been sidling up to the halls of power and effectively begging to help destroy privacy as thoroughly as possible.

I certainly know that my life was transformed for the worse by social media. And I don't mean that I went down any rabbit holes -- rather common culture was hollowed out, friends were distracted, friends fell down their own extremist rabbit holes. There is no successful social media company that actually cares about the negative impacts it has had on society. They speak about things such as "providing value" where value = time spent on the platform. They do not care if they ruin lives.

So a few years ago, nearly everywhere you went people are talking about how thoroughly AI was going to transform society. You couldn't go anywhere without hearing it. Of course people are wary. Big tech has been a net negative in very loud, intrusive, and obvious ways in _most_ people's lives. And now they're saying they're going to radically reform society.

The only hope we have is that they're wrong, and their power to change things will be minimal. For sure, if they really how the power to radically change everything, they would change it for the worse and would never spend a moment worrying about the damage they had done.

When I use a computer to do work I want the computer to be right. I want to be able to trust the computer. With the inherit non-determinism and probabilistic nature of generative-AI, that fundamental reason why I engage a computer is lost.

If the spreadsheet is wrong, it’s because the math is wrong, it’s because I made a mistake. It’s not because all of a sudden the computer decided the nature of algebra should be different than it is.

Part of the reason why humans are rejecting AI is that we are putting it in places where it makes no sense, or places where humans prefer a human in the loop, there are plenty of places where machine learning algorithms make sense, but customer service is not one of them.

Please link to the actual survey instead of this commission outlet, which didn't even link it themselves: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-an...

In the survey, 31% Americans believe AI will have an "equally positive and negative impact", and 13% are "not sure"; it's 16% pro 44% N/A 40% anti.

I wish the survey also included non-Americans, because from a 2025 survey (https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/10/15/how-people-aro...) people from other countries were less concerned; those from Israel and South Korea were more optimistic than pessimistic.

Notably, Pew did this survey 14 months ago and the results were better, but not by much: 17% pro 49% N/A 35% anti. They also did a survey in 2023, and already 50% of US respondents were "more concerned than excited" about AI, while only 10% were "more excited than concerned".

The pushback I see everywhere outside of tech suggests the tech industry vastly overestimated the interest. The tech industry doesn't speak for the entire planet as much as it likes to think it does.

Because the writing is on the wall already. Who hasn't been annoyed with "AI customer service", we already read about AI in the military, then you have the envisioned huge loss of jobs.

People generally seem to like using it as a chatbot, or answer questions, on their own terms. But anywhere it's been forced against the user asking for it has been a disaster.

Source Link - https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-an... is a better link.

It is to America’s great fortune that her technological innovations are not passed by committee. In particular, polls always capture the status quo. Other things that were widely unpopular: interracial marriage, gay marriage. And especially for technology, public opinion led to the stalling of fission power in the US.

So hurray for ignoring the majority of people. I’m glad people can offer other people services in a generally neutral way without needing to pass a committee.

Does not at all surprise me that people don't think losing their livelihoods would have a positive impact. Maybe AI companies should stop bragging about trying to do that if they're concerned about people hating them.

It's interesting that many developing and Asian countries have a more positive view of AI: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/15/people-around-the-w...

How much of this is due to AI vs. the government and corporate structures in society? (Saw elsewhere that Chinese people were also much more optimistic)

> Despite all of the skepticism, a whole lot of Americans also report using AI in their daily lives on an increasingly regular basis. About a quarter of Americans say they use AI chatbots on a daily basis. Those who do are typically using the chatbots for research purposes or for work, Pew says.

Yeah, we don't have a choice. These things were foisted upon us, and now we all just have to deal with it, so long as we want to keep being employed/employable.

Not surprising and well deserved: our industry has done a remarkably poor job at balancing public and shareholder interests. Of course that isn’t the _only_ industry in this situation, but its deep intricacies into personal lives and psyches has made it particularly bad.

The boss of the main private TV channel in France famously said in 90s that his job consisted in “selling brain time to advertisers”. What was handicraft has been turned into a mass extraction business by the Google and Facebook of our world. AI is the cherry on the cake, really.

Surprisingly high number given that people are being told by tech CEO that AI will replace all white collar jobs soon and a few years later AI guided robots will replace all blue collar jobs too.

I believe the current pessimistic atmosphere has very little to do with AI.

Sure, only 16% of Americans think AI will have a positive impact. But if you ask if they believe smart phone, social media, metaverse, crypto, etc will have a positive impact I highly doubt you'll get a much bigger number.

I am mixed on the question.

Claude has been quite helpful in reviewing my investments, and I have made a fair amount of money on his advice. His availability is unparalleled compared to any sort of financial planner.

Professionally, I have run my programs and scripts through Copilot/OpenAI and sometimes received caustic and fiery criticism, but others praise with helpful suggestions. Oftentimes it does make fundamental mistakes.

The threats of the end of the white collar class are not unduely worrying to me, as my retirement is close. Still, the whole of the culture is begin driven neurotic.

My answers to this question are personal, and atypical. Perhaps there will be general good in this somewhere, though it may be hard to see.

AI epitomises chasing a narrow definition of progress that benefits the few (increasing profits via automation) over a holistic definition of progress that benefits the many (reducing poverty, improving health, providing meaning). It's no wonder people hate it.

My observation of society is that, by default, people tend to have a belief system of "most tech that existed before I was born was fine; any new tech is bad/unnecessary".

So it doesn't surprise me that people are predisposed to not like this particular new tech.

> Pew writes that 44 percent of U.S. adults now say they use OpenAI’s chatbot, a figure that’s more than doubled since 2023.

> The next most popular chatbot is Gemini (24 percent), followed by Copilot (17 percent) and MetaAI (14 percent), with Grok (8 percent), Claude (6 percent) and Character.ai (3 percent) lagging behind.

Claude in 6th place, behind Gemini and Copilot and MetaAI and Grok?

No wonder the general public still think AI is junk.

Update: here's the underlying report: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-an...

The question there was "% of U.S. adults who say they ever use the following AI chatbots", so it's not a measure of overall usage, just exposure. Not surprising Gemini and Grok and MetaAI rank higher then.

It'd be interesting to see how many people thought cars would have a positive impact on society back in the day.

The promoters of AI themselves seem pretty convinced of the negative impact to society. It seems to even be part of the marketing.

There’s very clearly a Substack of putting everyone out of work, reducing the power of labor, so a few can profit.

imo the negative sentiment is less a practical response to AI specifically, and more an emotional response to digital technology in general.

Eg: i think my kids will likely be more comfortable, have more convenience, than me — but i worry a lot they will be more anxious and lonely.

I don’t personally believe this gets solved through regulation, religion, or self-discipline.

imo we just need technology products that drastically reduce the cost of things that make us less anxious and lonely

It's weird. For me the problem stems from how society uses AI, not from AI itself. I personally had totally positive experiences in my job but seeing people using ChatGPT like some magic truth machien is scary.

Without corporations and trillionaires involved would they think differently perhaps?

I don't think it's AI. I think it's the apathetic voterbase finally waking up to just how much tax dodging is going on.

The biggest threat isn't the bomb, bioweapon or AI supremacy. The true threat is AI's impact on human learning and development.

Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-an...

Well, everywhere AI is being sold in a way to replace humans. Humans don't want to think about having to use a product at work that is genuinely aimed at actually replacing their job.

AI is still a tool for complex tasks. Reaching impactful everyday use for regular users will take time. It is not clear who they interviewed for this study. It would be good to see how people in specific industries feel about AI.

Also relevant: Ten Percent Of U.S. High School Students Graduating Without Basic Object Permanence Skills - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssjokgx0pUQ

An instantaneous measure of a sentiment undergoing an exponential decay I sense

The one and only product for AI is labor displacement and wage suppression. That's why companies love it. That's why people hate it. We don't live in a society where the benefits will be shared. We live in a society that would rather let people die in the streets than potentially hurt shareholder value.

We are bouldering towards the total collapse of society. To me, it's like 10,000 people want to rule the post-apocalyptic world (Fallout style) where asking "maybe we shouldn't have the apocalypse?" is heresy.

Replace 'AI' with any other technology. Imagine if only 16% of people thought that the invention of the wheel or soap would have a positive impact.

The overall greater good of humanity matters more than anything else.

I think one positive thing that might come of this is for AI to act as a sort of counterweight to the fragmentation of reality into different filter bubbles.

It might be difficult to make models that have useful, high intelligence, but also are very biased. It could create a sort of grounding in logic and reality.

Grok might actually be early evidence of this. Despite the bad press it gets, it's really not so bad.

One can always hope ...

This number will go up in maybe ... 10 years?

They are all on this forum!

It's a shame, as AI will improve healthcare on an unprecedented scale.

I cannot get a specialist without referrals and endless appointments to spend more than 30min to discuss how to fix a serious issues. Claude? Hours and hours of back and forth. Public models now beat the specialized ones like OpenEvidence. Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-026-04431-5

Diagnostics is getting blown apart by AI, the best cancer screening will be available in even remote corners of this world.

We were constrained by the available brain mass of highly trained specialists - and this bottleneck is getting removed.

Hard not to be optimistic on AI if you're in healthcare.

Will AI have a positive impact on society in China?

AI has uses. But actually using it is analogous to setting your neighbor's house on fire so that you can roast marshmallows.

Marshmallows are pretty tasty, I guess.

I think views on AI are not really views on AI, they are views on capitalism. People don't feel optimistic that AI's impact will benefit ordinary people because, even if works out, the benefit will accrue only to capital owners. This view feels pretty understandable to me, but is ultimately orthogonal to whether AI is useful and effective for the kind of tasks we want to leverage it for.

The public is always against new technology that makes jobs obsolete.

This is awkward because the immense progress of the last 250 years has mostly come from such technology. Yet few people are aware of this.

I hope we can continue to progress by eliminating jobs, but the current backlash is probably the biggest I've seen in my life.

Tech companies have basically just milked advertising dollars from trad media, and centralized malls into websites.

Now we have dystopian warehouses and cars driving all over.

We get more, but we do less.

We interact with more of the world, but we interact with people less.

It makes us unhappy.

Must be missing some zeroes. There's no way that AI techbros and major shareholders are 16% of the US. Must be more like .0016%.

I think that the smartphone is the single worst thing to happen, not so much AI. AI will hopefully help deal with reckless people typing in their smartphones while driving etc.

Make no mistake: I am as much perpetrator as victim. While I am having even days off of my smartphone and never use it during driving, I am at least as much affected and addicted as most of us.

It's the people not technology. Way back before AI was the hot issue, Eric Schmidt said a new bar for being tone deaf by going straight for saying privacy is dead get over it. Not "here are some tools to retain some privacy," not "here is some legislation to punish privacy violations," just get over it.

It's gotten worse from there. The "dark enlightenment." Flirting with fascism. Creating the biggest meme stocks in history and promoting that as accomplishment. You're not fooling enough people. We might not be in your face about it, but we know you're not good people.

And a foolish 16 % at that

Most of what AI is visibly used for is very unwelcome for American consumers: spam, propaganda, bad art, bad memes, marketing calls, bad phone support... Then the future promise is mass unemployment... of course Americans are negative on it. What is the upside for them?

Just a reminder that the baddie isn't technology, but capitalism.

Half of Americans voters elected Trump. Most people are idiots, I wouldn’t use that as a gauge yet.

AI is capitalism gone wild.

50% of the S&P 500 valuation is now directly related to AI as are 40% of new layoffs.

A quote often attributed to Stalin/Lenin/Marx is something like, "Capitalists will sell the rope to be used to hang them".

AI is taking this even further. Corps are effectively borrowing tons of money in order to build the rope to hang the middle class --- to be followed by hanging themselves.

The idea that you can lay off the middle class and business will continue as usual is a capitalistic fantasy. Without jobs, people can't afford to buy products built with AI.

People don’t even know what it is, they think it’s chat bots. Useless statistic.

In the meantime, AI has given scientists 20 years of incredible tools, from which we now reap the fruits in our daily lives

It's hard to balance the downsides (devastating job losses that will affect certain fields) with the upsides (curing diseases, increasing efficiency in ways that will reduce costs of many goods).

Is something a net benefit if everything is cheaper and cancer is cured, but you have no job?

This is less insightful than what people might want to read into it. The democratic party has adopted an anti-ai stance as a position in the partisan football game. NPR tote bag carriers read with great concern about AI's terrible water usage (in reality a tiny fraction of that used in things such as lawns), and about the fact that it can do a better job than amateur artists.

On the other side, you don't see a similar upswell in support from the right. AI companies are from San Francisco, and their CEOs are weird, awkward, and probably gay abortion lovers.