AI trust and AI fears: A media debate that could divide society

We are at a tipping point of a new digital divide. While some embrace AI, many people will always prefer human experts even when they’re wrong.

Unless you live under a rock, you probably have been inundated with recent news on machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). With all the recent breakthroughs, it almost seems like AI can already predict the future. Police forces are using it to map when and where crime is likely to occur. Doctors can use it to predict when a patient is most likely to have a heart attack or stroke. Researchers are even trying to give AI imagination so it can plan for unexpected consequences.

Of course, many decisions in our lives require a good forecast, and AI agents are almost always better at forecasting than their human counterparts. Yet for all these technological advances, we still seem to deeply lack confidence in AI predictions. Recent cases show that people don’t like relying on AI and prefer to trust human experts, even if these experts are wrong.

If we want AI to really benefit people, we need to find a way to get people to trust it. To do that, we need to understand why people are so reluctant to trust AI in the first place.