A new survey by Elon University’s Imagining the Digital Future Center finds that more than half of American adults believe the expanded use of AI will have significant impacts on key human capacities and behaviors over the next decade.  

The survey asked U.S. adults about the effect of AI systems on 12 core human capacities. For each attribute, respondents said they expect the impact of AI to be more negative than positive in the next 10 years. This sentiment was particularly strong when it came to:

·      Social and emotional intelligence

·      Empathy and moral judgment

·      Capacity and willingness to think deeply about complex subjects

·      Sense of individual agency

·      Confidence in their own native abilities

·      Self-identity, meaning and purpose in life.

The full set of human capacities and behaviors we explored is presented in the chart below.

Notably, two traits near the bottom of the chart speak most directly to the future of democracy and AI’s impact on citizens. By four-to-one margins, U.S. adults believe AI will negatively affect people’s self-identity and sense of purpose, as well as their trust in widely shared values and cultural norms.

These findings matter profoundly. First, a core promise of democracy is the dignity of participation, the right to be heard, to be seen, and to have one’s voice shape personal and collective futures. Without that, meaning and purpose erode, and democracy cannot survive that kind of anomie.

Second, the foundational lubricant of democracy is the trust of citizens in widely shared values and norms. Without social and institutional trust, communities collapse. Americans think AI will worsen things on these fronts, and that is disastrous.

These findings point the way to the kind of monumental debates that democracies should be having about how AI can serve citizen capacities. How can AI systems be created to support the dignity of citizens and workers? How can we build AI systems with governance structures that are trustworthy and that buttress the trusting relationships among citizens?

The release of the survey material followed an earlier set of findings from the ITDF Center, which canvassed several hundred experts on these same questions. Comparing those results, the general public is considerably more negative about the impact of AI than experts are about the impact of AI on human curiosity and capacity to learn, people’s capacity for innovative thinking and creativity, decision-making and problem solving and human metacognition (the ability to think analytically about thinking). 

Notably, experts were more pessimistic than the public when asked about AI’s impact on trust in shared values and cultural norms.

A full comparison of expert and public opinion is shown in the chart below.

The survey of 1,005 U.S. adults was conducted by SSRS on its Opinion Panel from July 17-20, 2025, and has a margin of error of +/- 3.5 percentage points. Full methodology and topline results are available at the ITDF Center’s website.  The expert analysis is included in the 285-page report: “Being Human in 2035: How Are We Changing in the Age of AI?”