[Revised] Arc 1: How are AIs perceived in our society?

Main Thesis throughout Project 3:

Artificial Intelligence, (AI), is a fast-developing technology and its boundless potential has both brought fear and
excitement to society. While the mainstream media alarms people with its daunting remarks on AI, many
individuals and organizations behind the scene are tackling social issues with high technology. By understanding the
real risks and benefits of AI, people can improve their individual and collective environment.

Body 1
Topic sentence: While the perception of AI has changed positively in the most recent years, the fear and
uncertainty of AIs still exist within society.

Sentence that connects topic sentence to the following source below.

Rainie, Lee, et al. “Ai and Human Enhancement: Americans' Openness Is Tempered by a Range of Concerns.” Pew
Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech, Pew Research Center, 18 Mar. 2022,
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/03/17/ai-and-human-enhancement-americans-openness-is-temp
ered-by-a-range-of-concerns/.
● Credentials
○ Pew Research Center conducts data-driven social science research with public opinion polling,
demographic research, content analysis, and others.
○ The research team surveyed 10,260 U.S. adults from Nov. 1 to 7, 2021.
○ The research team for this article consists of Lee Rainie, Cary Funk, Monica Anderson, and Alec
Tyson
■ Lee Rainie is the director of internet and technology research at Pew Research Center.
■ Cary Funk is the director of science and society research at Pew Research Center
■ Monica Anderson is an associate director of research of Pew Research Center focusing
on internet and technology issues
■ Alec Tyson is an associate director of research at Pew Research Center focusing on
public views of science and technology and the implications of science for society.
● Quotes & arguments
● “Americans are far more positive than negative about the widespread use of facial recognition technology
by police to monitor crowds and look for people who may have committed a crime.
○ 46% of U.S. adults think this would be good, 27% think this is bad, and the other 27% are unsure.
● “By contrast, the public is much more cautious about a future with the widespread use of computer chip
implants in the brain to allow people to far more quickly and accurately process information.”
○ 56% think this would be bad for society
○ 13% think this would be a good idea
 ●
○ The figure above is a plot generated from the questionnaires. The number represents the
percentage of the total survey population choosing the column statement.
● “Uncertainty is among the themes seem in emerging public views of AI and human enhancement
applications”
● “Ambivalence is another theme in the survey data: 45% say they are equally excited and concerned about
the increased use of AI programs in daily life, compared with 37% who say they are more concerned than
excited and 18% who say they are more excited than concerned.”

After explaining the highlighted findings and showing the figure above, I will introduce AI anxiety.

Body 2
Topic sentence: As humans perceive AIs as a threat to their jobs, competency, and identity, AI anxiety reflects on
human’s yearning for stability and predictability.

Weaving from the last sentence in body 1 about AI Anxiety, I will bring in the source below.
Evidence:
Li, Jian, and Jin-Song Huang. “Dimensions of Artificial Intelligence Anxiety Based on the Integrated Fear
Acquisition Theory.” Technology in Society, vol. 63, 2020, p. 101410.,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2020.101410.
● Credentials
 ○ This article is a peer-reviewed journal by Juan Li and Jin-Song Huang.
■ Jain Li is an undergraduate student at the School of Economics and Management at
Beihang University, China.
■ Jin-Song Huang is a professor at the School of Economics and Management at Beihang
University, China. He has masters and Ph.D. degrees from Tsinghua University.
● Dimension of AI Anxiety
○ AI Anxiety: the feeling of fear or agitation about out-of-control AI (Johnson & Verdicchio, 2017).
○ Using 494 questionnaires and first-order confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), the research team has
factored AI anxiety.
■ They discovered “eight anxieties that may contribute to AI anxiety: (1) privacy violation
anxiety, (2) bias behavior anxiety, (3) job replacement anxiety, (4) learning anxiety, (5)
existential risk anxiety, (6) ethics violation anxiety, (7) artificial consciousness anxiety,
and (8) lack of transparency anxiety.”
■ Because the table is about 4 pages long and the study covers each anxiety in-depth, I will
choose two or three to focus on for this research.
■ Job replacement anxiety
● Worried that AI will replace work in the future
● Anxious of working with AI smarter than the human
■ Learning anxiety
● Not being able to perform professional courses in AI
● Don’t have the capacity to understand complex AI algorithms
● AI technology develops quickly, harder to catch up
■ Existential risk anxiety
● AIs may harm humans to achieve the goal
● Control of AIs by a few individuals who may have bad intentions
■ Artificial consciousness anxiety
● AIs having consciousness
● AIs with the same level of consciousness as humans challenge the status of
humans
● AIs are counted as the same as humans with their consciousness

A sentence or two about how mainstream media shapes these existential risk anxiety and artificial consciousness
anxiety with the source below.

Superintelligence. Directed by Ben Falcone, New Line Cinema, Bron Studios, 2020.
● Film synopsis provided by Google
○ “When a powerful superintelligence chooses to study Carol, the most average person on Earth, the
fate of the world hangs in the balance. As the AI decides whether to enslave, save or destroy
humanity, it’s up to Carol to prove people are worth living.
● Genre: Comedy, Action, Romantic comedy
● The trailer is attached here.
● Argument:
○ The film Superintelligence is a perfect example of how AIs are portrayed in mainstream media,
especially in the film industry.
■ Portrays AIs gaining consciousness and further threatening humanity.
■ Connects to existential risk anxiety and artificial consciousness anxiety in Li and Huang’s
study about AI anxiety.
Arc 2: To what extent are AIs actually harmful? To what extent is our fear an
actual reality?

Main Thesis throughout Project 3:

Artificial Intelligence, (AI), is a fast-developing technology and its boundless potential has both brought fear and
excitement to society. While the mainstream media alarms people with its daunting remarks on AI, many
individuals and organizations behind the scene are tackling social issues with high technology. By understanding the
real risks and benefits of AI, people can improve their individual and collective environment.

Body 1:
Topic sentence: The public’s opinion on AI altered in recent years as the use of AI became frequent in the
environment; however, the people’s fears of AI violating privacy and making biased decisions still
remains prevalent.

Tansition from Arch 1 by discussing people’s fear of AI, not shaped by mainstream media or the lack of
knowledge in this subject.

Evidence:
Li, Jian, and Jin-Song Huang. “Dimensions of Artificial Intelligence Anxiety Based on the Integrated Fear
Acquisition Theory.” Technology in Society, vol. 63, 2020, p. 101410.,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2020.101410.
● AI Anxiety: the feeling of fear or agitation about out-of-control AI (Johnson & Verdicchio, 2017).
○ Using 494 questionnaires and first-order confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), the research team has
factored AI anxiety.
■ They discovered “eight anxieties that may contribute to AI anxiety: (1) privacy violation
anxiety, (2) bias behavior anxiety, (3) job replacement anxiety, (4) learning anxiety, (5)
existential risk anxiety, (6) ethics violation anxiety, (7) artificial consciousness anxiety,
and (8) lack of transparency anxiety.”
■ Privacy violation
● AI will monitor individuals’ behaviors
● Collects too much personal information
● Unsettling predictions of preference
■ Bias behavior anxiety
● AI is racially discriminatory
● AI price discrimination for different people
● AI treating people differently
■ Lack of transparency anxiety
● Not being sure what part of AI errored and what did not
● Not being to figure out how AI makes decisions
● Confusing responsibility for addressing operational failures in AI

Explain how AI bias and possibilities of AI erroring is an ongoing issue. Introduce to the real challenges of AI and
why with the source below.

Shane, Janelle. “The Danger of AI is Weirder Than You Think | Janelle Shane.” YouTube, uploaded by TED, 13
Nov. 2019, https://youtu.be/OhCzX0iLnOc
 ● Credentials
○ Janelle Shane is a writer, public speaker, optics research scientist, and AI researcher.
● In the Ted Talk, Janelle Shane explains how concerning points about AIs are not about replacing jobs or
harming the humanities, but rather about programming the AI wrong.
○ Since AI is not aware of the world outside of the line of codes and data provided, they try to
achieve the goal in any way possible.
○ Asking/ programming what AI should do (communication) is important or it will lead to biases
and destructive behavior without AI knowing their behavior.
○ For instance, Amazon's resume sorting algorithm learned to discriminate against women.
■ This was because they have trained the AI with the resume in the past, which led to
avoiding resumes with the word “women.”
● The industry had more male workers in the past.
● Quotes
○ “In real life though, the AI that we actually have is not nearly smart enough for that.” (1:20)
○ “So today’s AI can do a task like identify a pedestrian in a picture, but it doesn’t have a concept of
what the pedestrian is beyond that it’s a collection of lines and textures and things.” (1:48)
○ “The danger of AI is not that it’s going to rebel against us, it’s that it’s going to do exactly what we
ask it to do.” (2:55)
○ “And it’s really easy to accidentally give AI the wrong problem to solve, and often we don’t
realize that until something has actually gone wrong.” (5:11)
○ “So its entire world is the data that I gave it. … it doesn’t know about anything else.” (6:03)
○ “So it is through the data that we often accidentally tell AI to do the wrong thing.” (6:14)
○ “So you see why it is so hard to design an AI that actually can understand what it’s looking at.”
(7:02)
○ “ So, when we’re working with AI, it’s up to us to avoid problems.” (9:24)
○ “We as humans have to learn how to communicate with AI. We have to learn what AI is capable of
doing and what it’s not.” (10:00).
Body 2:
Topic sentence: AI bias can negatively affect the individual’s daily life and worsen the perpetual
inequalities within society without knowing their behavior.

Bring in an example.

Obermeyer, Ziad, et al. “Dissecting Racial Bias in an Algorithm Used to Manage the Health of Populations.”
Science, vol. 366, no. 6464, 2019, pp. 447–453., https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aax2342.

● Credentials
● This article was published in Science Journal, an international nonprofit scientific association.
● The authors are Ziad Obermeyer, Brian Powers, Christine Vogeli, Sendhil Mullainathan
○ Ziad Obermeyer is a researcher and a Health Policy and Management associate professor at UC
Berkeley School of Public Health.
○ Brian Powers is a Deputy Chief Medical Officer at Humana
○ Christine Vogeli, PhD. is a Director of Evaluation and Research for the Center of Population
Health, Partners Healthcare, a health services researcher, and a Medicine assistant professor at
Harvard Medical School.
○ Sendhil Mullainathan is a Computation and Behavior Science professor at the University of
Chicago Booth School of Business.
● Findings & Quotes
 ○ “Health systems rely on commercial prediction algorithms to identify and help patients with
complex health needs”
○ In the study, the research team found that the widely used algorithms have been affecting large
populations of people with significant racial bias.
■ The algorithm utilizes risk scores to calculate health care costs and the study exhibits
algorithm bias with a risk score, thus leading to racial and economic inequalities.
■ “At a given risk score, Black patients are considerably sicker than White patients, as
evidenced by signs of uncontrolled illnesses. ”
○ Fixing this bias by setting the algorithm to predict illness rather than costs with its risk score will
remedy the disparity.
■ “increase the percentage of Black patients receiving additional help from 17.7 to 46.5%.”

This algorithm bias demonstrates how the real harm in AIs are not AIs gaining consciousness and
destroying humanity, but AIs following orders from humans too exactly.

Arc 3: To what extent are AIs actually helpful?

Yet to develop.
Evidence:

Roose, Kevin. “The 2021 Good Tech Awards.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 27 Dec. 2021,
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/27/technology/the-2021-good-tech-awards.html.

The Process of Formulating Arc 2

Last Assignment Suggestion:
- Add Credentials
- Topic sentence for each body paragraph
- “Do you want to pick another angle? Like either To what extent does social media or
Instagram (or another one) harm society? Or, how can people become more aware of the
harms of social media?”
My goal: Need to narrow down my topic
Sources not used
Schmelzer, Ron. “Should We Be Afraid of Ai?” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 31 Oct. 2019,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/10/31/should-we-be-afraid-of-ai/?sh=12122f5b4331.
● Credentials
○ Ron Schmelzer is a principal analyst at Cognilytica, a firm focused on research, advisory, and
education, and also a writer for Forbes and TechTarget.

Acemoglu, Daron. Harms of AI. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2021, https://doi.org/10.3386/w29247.

Free Write (in fragments)

As I realize my topic should be more focused on one field of a topic, I want to discuss fear/
preconceived notions of Artificial Intelligence and argue against them. By doing so, I
hope to give evidence of how AI could be used for social good.
My “so what” Statement is unclear, but I hope my research inspires people to explore the field of
AI.

Thesis:
Artificial Intelligence, (AI), is a fast-developing technology and its boundless potential has both
brought fear and excitement to society. With different individuals, companies, and
organizations studying AIs for various purposes, people get agitated about the powerful
technology used in the wrong hand, or machines gaining sentience and destroying
humanity. However, many individuals are tackling the crippling issues within our society
with AIs outside the mainstream media attention.
Arc 1: How are AIs perceived in our society?
● Topic Sentence: Without much information about the high technology field, people’s
perception is shaped by the mainstream media; the daunting stories of AIs used for
destruction and films and books portraying sentient machines destroying humanity
exacerbate the fear.
○ Fear of AIs (actually exists!)
○ Used in the wrong hand
○ Machine taking over the humanity
○ Just doesn’t know much about the field.

Arc 2: To what extent are AIs actually harmful? To what extent is our fear an actual reality?
● Topic Sentence: TBD

Arc 3: To what extent are AIs actually helpful?

● Topic Sentence: TBD

LINE OF THOUGHTS IN MY HEAD

Seems like people are not all negative about AI. Rather we can divide their opinion up depending
on which AI technique they are using.
- Facial Recognition for judicial purposes
- Positive opinion
- BUT facial recognition technology has been reported to cause racial profiling.
- Human augmentation (Genetics modification/ chips implant, etc.)
- Negative opinion/concerns greater than excitement
- Reflection of how humans are afraid of machine/ technology causing harm to
them as individuals and messing up the ordinary nature of life.
- Overall ambivalent feelings towards AI being part of daily life.
- Most people are both excited and concerned
 - This indicates that the trend of public opinion on AI has changed. From 6 to 4
years ago, people had more fear of AIs, but now the public has more varying
opinions on this subject.
- HOWEVER, there still exists the preconceived notion of AI harming
humans and ethical and societal dilemmas that people are not totally aware
of —> this uncertainty may shape people’s opinion in negative/ positive
ways or be ambivalent in general.
- What causes AI anxiety?
- 8 different anxieties are found in the source.
- The paper will be longer if I explain it all, so I will choose several anxieties
among 8.
- Humans feel threatened when certain outside factors alter the status quo and
challenge their identity.
- Therefore, AI might seem alarming to some groups of people as this high
technology can change the livelihood of people in the negative ways
- People fear that by making the job easier and effective, AIs will
take away jobs
- People are anxious that they won’t be able to keep up with the
complex and fast-developing nature of AI algorithms.
- This also threatens the work status as more implementation
of AIs in the company means workers’ competency
regarding controlling the AIs will become significantly
important.
- Machine being conscious also scares people because
fundamentally this is challenging why humans are humans.
- If AI and humans are both considered humans, the identity
of being a human is challenged.
-