“34% of the US public is now aware of AI xrisk, and the curve is steepening” by otto.barten

(This post is an update from a previous one here.)

The Existential Risk Observatory has been interested in public awareness of AI existential risk since its inception over five years ago. We started surveying public awareness in December 2022, including by asking the following open question:

"Please list three events, in order of probability (from most to least probable), that you believe could potentially cause human extinction within the next 100 years."

If respondents would include AI or similar terms in their top-3 extinction risks ("robots" or "computers" count, "technology" doesn't), we counted them as aware, if not, as unaware. The aim of this methodology was to see how many people would spontaneously, without getting led by the question, connect the concepts of human extinction and AI. We used Prolific to find participants, n=300, and we only included US inhabitants over eightteen years old and fluent in English.

In the four surveys we ran, we obtained 7% (Dec '22), 12% (Apr '23), 15% (Apr '24), 24% (Dec '25), and, today, 34%. In a graph, that looks like this.

The usual caveats apply: ours is a rough measurement method, and from participants' answers to our open questions, we see that [...]

---

First published:
August 19th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tBo72ytuzJKbYrvhK/34-of-the-us-public-is-now-aware-of-ai-xrisk-and-the-curve

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.