Unaware and unaccepting: Human biases and the advent of artificial intelligence.

Generating accurate assessments of future technological capabilities becomes increasingly difficult as the rate at which technological progress accelerates. The current research reviews the rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) and examines the human biases that impede its assessment. In two online experiments (N = 161; N = 151), we find evidence that people are prone to underestimate AI capabilities due to the exponential growth bias (i.e., the tendency to underestimate exponential growth). Moreover, we find evidence that people reject the aversive implications of rapid technological progress even in cases in which they themselves predict the growth rate, due to the motivated reasoning bias (i.e., the desire to search for and interpret information in ways consistent with one's desires).