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What Drives Anti-Tech Attitudes?

October 2024

Abundance at TED AI

If you’re at TED AI San Francisco this week make sure to catch Chris Koopman and Neil Chilson’s AI public policy panel on October 23 at 2 PM Pacific.

Understanding Anti-technology Sentiments

We recently published a new working paper with a ton of interesting and relevant findings on questions that drive our work at the Abundance Institute. The authors are two researchers I’ve gotten to know a bit over the last couple of years: Jan Zilinsky at the Technical University of Munich and Thomas Zeitzoff at American University. In this paper, they seek to get beyond the typical polling questions about how Americans feel about social media or AI and more to the motivations for those feelings. They have a syndicated op-ed summarizing the paper themselves. As they say in their Introduction: “All of this suggests three things about anti-technology sentiment: 1) that it is an important and possibly growing phenomenon; 2) that it is core to many important political and sociological theories; but 3) that it has been undertheorized and frequently assessed using limited metrics.” Jan and Thomas sought to solve these questions by analyzing data from two tailored surveys deployed by two different survey companies—a fairly unique approach.

Some highlights from the paper I found most interesting:

  • Americans’ Two Minds About Tech: “What immediately stands out from the data is that tech-critical sentiment among respondents is common: significant majorities believe that social media has detrimental effects on children and teenagers, and there is a prevailing notion that modern technology on the whole has excessive influence over our daily lives. The perception that AI advancements will lead to job losses is also widespread. At the same time, most respondents also concurred that modern technology made their lives more convenient, and that social platforms facilitate activism or staying connected to one’s friends and family.” [I see this all the time in surveys].
  • “Perhaps surprisingly, the relatively older respondents express lower anti-tech attitudes: on average, Americans who are sixty five years old or older score 0.16 below the mean level of antitech attitudes. We also see that Republicans are relatively more oriented against modern technology than Democrats.”
  • “We see that anti-establishment views and loneliness (plus a need for chaos and a need for uniqueness in the Lucid survey) are positively associated anti-tech attitudes.”
  • “Approval of Politically Motivated Violence”: In their authors’ first survey (dataset 1), respondents were asked if they agreed with the actions and/or sentiment of a fictional scenario in which “a man threw a firebomb into the empty house of a powerful billionaire CEO of a social media technology company.” The man “express[ed] the view that tech CEOs ‘just want to make money’ and do not care if their products ‘divide our country, and hurt our children.’” “49 percent of respondents in dataset 1 agreed with ‘what the man said,’ and 21 percent somewhat or strongly supported the action.”
  • Finally, if you’re involved in AI policy and communicating with policymakers and the media about AI, Section 3 and Figure 11 of this paper is for you because it’s all about the most persuasive arguments for and against AI development. The strongest argument of them all, both pro and con, is actually a pro-AI development argument: “AI can speed up medical research and improve early diagnosis of diseases.”

Do read the full paper and the op-ed!

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