Public fears about the impact of AI systems on the essence of being human
September 17, 2025
Imagining the Digital Future Center Director Lee Rainie used his plenary address to describe his decade-long research into the impact of artificial intelligence on humans and how that work led to this year’s explorations of how experts and the general public think about the ways AI systems might affect essential human behaviors and capacities.
Rainie noted that in 2014 the Center canvassed experts on the key question of whether AI and automation would kill more jobs than it created, or vice versa. It turned out that the hundreds of expert respondents to that canvassing were almost exactly evenly split. Half felt more jobs would be created than destroyed as AI systems advanced and half felt the opposite. He continued:
“The one answer we got from those experts – whether they thought things would turn out well or ill in labor markets – was that a saving grace for people doing work in the future would be what was called at the time ‘soft skills.’ … They were referring to the social things that humans do that distinguish them from computers and add special, deep forms of intelligence, moral wisdom and critical thinking to human endeavors.”
Yet, as AI machine learning and neural networks came to the fore in recent years, Rainie argued that the distinction between human “soft skills” and computer “hard skills” has shrunk. Computers increasingly do things that mimic people’s emotional, social and moral intelligence. As a consequence, “the essence of being human” is now a critical thing to study, he said.
So, he and his research partner, Janna Anderson, set out to study the effect of AI systems on the core human capacities and behaviors that anchor what it means to be human. Specifically, he said Center fielded a questionnaire to experts probing whether AI systems would have a more positive or negative impact on these 12 traits:
- Curiosity and capacity to learn
- Creativity
- Decision-making and problem-solving abilities
- Capacity to think deeply
- Metacognition, think about your own thinking
- Social and emotional intelligence
- Empathy, application of moral judgment
- Self-identity, meaning, and purpose in life
- Trust in shared values and cultural norms
- Individual agency
- Mental well-being
- Confidence in their own abilities
In the public opinion survey findings Rainie released at this conference, a representative sample of U.S. adults felt that AI would have a more negative than positive impact on all 12 of the human capabilities in the next decade. Experts had been more downcast about nine of the 12 items, he noted. Thus, the public is even more downcast about the future impact of AI on the essence of being human.
One of the major surprises in the public opinion survey, Rainie said, involved varying views among people with different levels of formal education.
He noted that it is usually the case in technology adoption that those with college degrees are more likely than those who ended their formal education with a high school diploma or less to be tech enthusiasts and earlier adopters. In the case of these questions about the impact of AI systems, Rainie said that this pattern was flipped and those with more education were more worried about AI’s impact than others. He said the study did not probe why that might be the case, but speculated it could be tied to new worries among those with high levels of education about white-collar job losses tied to AI, or a general worry that the physical and mental well-being of large segments of society might be jeopardized by the advances in AI.
Rainie concluded by noting that the Center’s recent rounds of research suggested that experts and the general public feel this is a pivotal moment for people and their institutions. The conference proceedings suggested that there is a strong view among participants that “we can still shape the way things go if we are discerning and make good decisions.”
The slides from Rainie’s presentation, including the data on the survey findings, can be found here.