Recently, Nathan Young and I wrote about arguments for AI risk and put them on the AI Impacts wiki. In the process, we ran a casual little survey of

What happens if you present 500 people with an argument that AI is risky?

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2024-12-23 22:00:03

Recently, Nathan Young and I wrote about arguments for AI risk and put them on the AI Impacts wiki. In the process, we ran a casual little survey of the American public regarding how they feel about the arguments, initially (if I recall) just because we were curious whether the arguments we found least compelling would also fail to compel a wide variety of people.

The results were very confusing, so we ended up thinking more about this than initially intended and running four iterations total. This is still a small and scrappy poll to satisfy our own understanding, and doesn’t involve careful analysis or error checking. But I’d like to share a few interesting things we found. Perhaps someone else wants to look at our data more carefully, or run more careful surveys about parts of it.

p(doom): “If humanity develops very advanced AI technology, how likely do you think it is that this causes humanity to go extinct or be substantially disempowered?” Responses had to be given in a text box, a slider, or with buttons showing ranges