We didn’t directly examine why worry is increasing, across these surveys. I agree that would be an interesting thing to examine in additional work.
That said, when we asked people why they agreed or disagree with the CAIS statement, people who agreed mentioned a variety of factors including “tech experts” expressing concerns and the fact that they had seen Terminator etc., and directly observing characteristics of AI (e.g. that it seemed to be learning faster than we would be able to handle). In the CAIS statement writeup, we only examined the reasons why people disagreed (the responses tended to be more homogeneous, because many people were just saying ~ it’s a serious threat), but we could potentially do further analysis of why they agreed. We’d also be interested to explore this in future work.
It’s also perhaps worth noting that we originally wanted to run Pulse monthly, which would allow us to track changes in response to specific events (e.g. the releases of new LLM versions). Now we’re running it quarterly (due to changes in the funding situation), that will be less feasible.
We didn’t directly examine why worry is increasing, across these surveys. I agree that would be an interesting thing to examine in additional work.
That said, when we asked people why they agreed or disagree with the CAIS statement, people who agreed mentioned a variety of factors including “tech experts” expressing concerns and the fact that they had seen Terminator etc., and directly observing characteristics of AI (e.g. that it seemed to be learning faster than we would be able to handle). In the CAIS statement writeup, we only examined the reasons why people disagreed (the responses tended to be more homogeneous, because many people were just saying ~ it’s a serious threat), but we could potentially do further analysis of why they agreed. We’d also be interested to explore this in future work.
It’s also perhaps worth noting that we originally wanted to run Pulse monthly, which would allow us to track changes in response to specific events (e.g. the releases of new LLM versions). Now we’re running it quarterly (due to changes in the funding situation), that will be less feasible.