Adopting Ai: How Familiarity Breeds Both Trust And Contempt

This paper examines existing data on public support for AI-enabled autonomous systems and uses the literature on technology diffusion to examine existing theories about the determinants of technological adoption. Surveys and polls provide valuable snapshots of support for AI technologies and their change over time, but what drives support for the adoption of AI-enabled autonomous systems in the first instance is still unclear. This paper seeks to answer this question by identifying a series of hypotheses and testing them in a subsequent data section.