Kristian Stout Quoted in The Daily Caller on AI Adoption and Public Trust
The Daily Caller quoted ICLE Director of Innovation Policy Kristian Stout in an article on a Rutgers survey of Americans’ views on AI. The piece examines rising AI use alongside reluctance to let AI make final decisions about hiring, loans, college admissions, and other consequential matters without human oversight. It also looks at public support for government regulation and how much users understand about the technology. Read the full article here.
“Early e-commerce had the same problem. Consumers would not put credit cards into websites because the payment infrastructure was not trustworthy. Adoption followed the build-out of the necessary trust infrastructure. This includes Amazon normalizing the “paying online” experience, SSL and secure payments becoming well known ways for consumers to trust sites, and credit-card networks and issuers building anti-fraud technology and policies into the system. Once the risk in the system felt manageable, consumers adopted in droves,” Kristian Stout, the director of innovation policy for the International Center for Law & Economics, told the Daily Caller News Foundation in a written statement.
“The market cannot broadly adopt them until counterparties and the people deploying them can trust what they will do,” Stout remarked, adding that the “mechanisms that get us over this hump are mostly institutional, not psychological.”
“As those guardrails mature, expect the same adoption curve e-commerce followed,” Stout said.
Consumers often say they want strong regulation “in the abstract,” but the conversation becomes more nuanced when pushed for details, Stout remarked.
“People say regulate AI in a general sense. They also say they want to keep using the tools they love. They want disclosure when AI evaluates them. They want the systems that help them to thrive,” Stout explained. “This is very similar to the gaps we see in privacy surveys and what technologies consumers actually want to use every day. The gap between strict regulation and limited technical understanding is partly an artifact of survey design. A blunt preference question and a fine-grained knowledge quiz measure different things.”