Profiling public perception of emerging technologies: Gene editing, brain chips and exoskeletons. A data-analytics framework

Abstract

Three AI developments, classified as forms of human enhancements, center around progress at the intersection of AI, nanotechnology and biotechnology. Our research advances the understanding of AI and human enhancement by data-driven analytics and offers practical tools for future research and societal applications. It is based on a survey that was launched by PRC in February 2021 to more than 5,000 respondents from the U.S. It consists of about 100 questions that are grouped using a prefix code by the 3 above-mentioned human enhancement, science role, concerns and excitements, perceived algorithm fairness and demographics. To investigate this survey and extract insights regarding the general attitude, a data analytics framework is proposed that consists of clustering using DBSCAN and K-means, ANOVA for clusters, PCA, t-SNE and UMAP for graphical visualization, prediction and advanced customers’ profiles analyses. Both clustering methods indicate distinct profiles for AI customers. Most of them are moderate, but two smaller groups define the tech-ethics advocates and tech-forward visionaries. For prediction, in the multi-class classification task, the ROC-AUC score is 0.852 and average F1 Score is 0.987. Following the results, both technology creators and legislators must work collaboratively to ensure that technological advancements are ethically grounded, widely accepted and aligned with societal values.

Keywords

• Data analytics framework
• Human enhancements
• AI
• Questionnaire
• Machine learning