IE University: European Technology Insights Report 2024

IE University has released its European Tech Insights 2024. The annual survey of Europeans’ attitudes towards technological change aims to understand how technology is changing our lives and how it should be governed, and this year includes the views of European civil servants.

The report takes a closer look at attitudes towards AI and elections in the context of a super election year, AI and public services, the integration of emerging technologies into everyday life and space technologies. This year, the Centre for Transformative Governance partnered with Appolitical, the world’s largest community of public servants, to survey citizens and a small sample of public servants.

As AI continues to be integrated into key areas of government, the vast majority of Europeans (67%) are concerned that elections could be hacked. Concerns about AI being misused in elections are particularly high in the UK (54%) and Spain (51%). Despite these concerns, younger generations are showing greater openness to AI, with 34% of Europeans under 35 trusting an AI application to vote for a political candidate on their behalf.

European Technology Insights highlights public attitudes towards the use of AI in public services:

• AI received strong support in areas such as traffic optimization (77%) and helping job seekers (79%).
• 75% of Europeans support the use of artificial intelligence in police and military operations, such as facial recognition and biometric data for surveillance.

The report also examines the digital readiness of 10 European governments, assessing whether citizens and civil servants believe they are progressing fast enough in their digital transformation.

• 34.9% of European citizens and 31.7% of civil servants trust the accuracy of AI tools in summarizing parliament’s work.
• Citizens approve of the government’s efforts to use technology to improve public service delivery, scoring an average of 2.8 out of 5, while civil servants scored slightly higher at 3.2 out of 5.

The report quantifies Europeans’ readiness to integrate a number of emerging technologies into their daily lives:

• Most Europeans believe that within the next 10 years they will have access to medical devices that treat patients remotely (75.3%), humanoid robots that do household chores (56.8%), 3D-printed organs (55.7%) and augmented reality contact lenses (52.9%).
• 35.6% of European citizens are willing to use neurostimulation devices to improve their mood, stress levels or mental health.
• 33.3% of Europeans are willing to use eye-connected devices to record their memories.

Finally, we also investigated Europeans' attitudes towards space exploration:

• 53.2% of Europeans believe that Europe does not invest enough in space exploration.
• 53.9% of European citizens prioritize space scientific research and discovery; 88.4% of civil servants share this view.
• 70.2% of Europeans support public-private partnerships in the space race.

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