AI experts show significant disagreement

_Published 3 August 2022; last updated 3 August 2022_

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The 2022 Expert Survey on Progress in AI (2022 ESPAI) is a survey of machine learning researchers that AI Impacts ran in June-August 2022.

Contents

## **Details**

### Background

The 2022 ESPAI is a rerun of the [2016 Expert Survey on Progress in AI](https://aiimpacts.org/2016-expert-survey-on-progress-in-ai/) that researchers at AI Impacts previously collaborated on with others. Almost all of the questions were identical, and both surveyed authors who recently published in NeurIPS and ICML, major machine learning conferences.

Zhang et al ran a followup survey in 2019 (published in 2022)[1](https://aiimpacts.org/2022-expert-survey-on-progress-in-ai/#easy-footnote-bottom-1-3246 "") however they reworded or altered many questions, including the definitions of HLMI, so much of their data is not directly comparable to that of the 2016 or 2022 surveys, especially in light of large potential for framing effects observed.

### Methods

#### Population

We contacted approximately 4271 researchers who published at the conferences NeurIPS or ICML in 2021. These people were selected by taking all of the authors at those conferences and randomly allocating them between this survey and a survey being run by others. We then contacted those whose email addresses we could find. We found email addresses in papers published at those conferences, in other public data, and in records from our previous survey and Zhang et al 2022. We received 738 responses, some partial, for a 17% response rate.

Participants who previously participated in the the 2016 ESPAI or Zhang et al surveys received slightly longer surveys, and received questions which they had received in past surveys (where random subsets of questions were given), rather than receiving newly randomized questions. This was so that they could also be included in a ‘matched panel’ survey, in which we contacted all researchers who completed the 2016 ESPAI or Zhang et al surveys, to compare responses from exactly the same samples of researchers over time. These surveys contained additional questions matching some of those in the Zhang et al survey.

#### Contact

We invited the selected researchers to take the survey via email. We accepted responses between June 12 and August 3, 2022.

#### Questions

The full list of survey questions is available below, as exported from the survey software. The export does not preserve pagination, or data about survey flow. Participants received randomized subsets of these questions, so the survey each person received was much shorter than that shown below.

[2022ESPAIV](https://aiimpacts.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/2022ESPAIV.pdf) [Downl

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