  Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) researchers play an
important role in the ethics and governance of AI, including taking action
against what they perceive to be unethical uses of AI (Belfield, 2020; Van
Noorden, 2020). Nevertheless, this influential group's attitudes are not well
understood, which undermines our ability to discern consensuses or
disagreements between AI/ML researchers. To examine these researchers' views,
we conducted a survey of those who published in the top AI/ML conferences (N =
524). We compare these results with those from a 2016 survey of AI/ML
researchers (Grace, Salvatier, Dafoe, Zhang, & Evans, 2018) and a 2018 survey
of the US public (Zhang & Dafoe, 2020). We find that AI/ML researchers place
high levels of trust in international organizations and scientific
organizations to shape the development and use of AI in the public interest;
moderate trust in most Western tech companies; and low trust in national
militaries, Chinese tech companies, and Facebook. While the respondents were
overwhelmingly opposed to AI/ML researchers working on lethal autonomous
weapons, they are less opposed to researchers working on other military
applications of AI, particularly logistics algorithms. A strong majority of
respondents think that AI safety research should be prioritized and that ML
institutions should conduct pre-publication review to assess potential harms.
Being closer to the technology itself, AI/ML re-searchers are well placed to
highlight new risks and develop technical solutions, so this novel attempt to
measure their attitudes has broad relevance. The findings should help to
improve how researchers, private sector executives, and policymakers think
about regulations, governance frameworks, guiding principles, and national and
international governance strategies for AI.
