Between 25 April and 22 May 2024, interviewers working on behalf of the European Commission interviewed 26,415 residents of the 27 member states, aged 15 and over, face to face in their homes or, in five countries, by video. They read a preamble about AI being used in workplaces to monitor and evaluate workers or assign them tasks, and asked. To the statement "Robots and Artificial Intelligence are technologies that require careful management", 84 per cent of respondents answered that they agreed. To "Due to the use of robots and artificial intelligence, more jobs will disappear than new jobs will be created", 66 per cent agreed. Asked how they perceived the use of these technologies for "Automatically firing workers", 78 per cent answered negatively, and for "Monitoring workers", 63 per cent did (29, European Commission, 2025). The same respondents were not against the technology: 62 per cent perceived the use of robots and AI in the workplace positively (29, European Commission, 2025). People can welcome a tool and fear what it might be used for in the same breath.
The pattern repeats wherever it has been measured. In August 2024 the Pew Research Center asked a probability panel of 5,410 adults in the United States whether the increased use of AI in daily life made them feel more excited than concerned, more concerned than excited, or equally both; 51 per cent answered more concerned than excited, against 15 per cent of 1,013 people who had written or presented at AI conferences (32, McClain et al., 2025). In the nine EU member states Pew surveyed in spring 2025 the share more concerned than excited ran from 29 per cent in Germany to 50 per cent in Italy (33, Poushter et al., 2025). Ipsos, a market research company, found in March and April 2025, as an unweighted average of its 30 country results in a vendor survey, 53 per cent agreeing that products and services using AI made them nervous and 52 per cent that they made them excited (31, Ipsos, 2025).
Now set those answers beside the records of harm. In Eurostat's 2024 survey, 21.54 per cent of EU enterprises with ten or more persons employed reported an ICT security incident of the kind Question 7 describes below, and most of them were failures, not attacks. In the AI Incident Database the largest group of classified incidents is people using AI against other people, and the subdomain closest to the machine that escapes holds three records (35, Responsible AI Collaborative, 2026). The stories that travel and the harms the records contain are not the same list, and this chapter is about that gap.
Primary topics explored
- The questions
- The instinct
- The evidence
- The picture corrected
- The rule of thumb
- What to do
About Landscape
Landscape is a companion to The Transformed Architecture. It examines what happens when artificial intelligence takes the manager's chair: algorithmic management of direction, evaluation, consequence, development and care, the effects on people, the management of AI agents, Europe's legal answer, and how to design an accountable AI boss, for European enterprises and public authorities.
It builds on the conclusions of Architecture as Code, AI Governance, AI Platform and Security, AI Red Team, AI Threat and The Transformed Security Architect.
Executives, line managers, HR and people leaders, works councils and trade unions, public employers, architects and AI governance leads, data protection and legal officers, procurement and programme leaders, and risk, compliance and audit.
Gunnar Nordqvist
Conceived, directed and published the books of The Transformed Architecture.
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Chapter 9: The Fear Instinct: The Loud Harms and the Quiet Ones in Landscape gives the detailed explanations, practical examples and implementation patterns behind this summary.
This whitepaper belongs to “The Instincts” and is one of 26 drawn from the manuscript.