I would caution people against reading too much into this. If you poll people about a concept they know nothing about (“AI will cause the end of the human race”) you will always get answers that don’t reflect real belief. These answers are very easily swayed, they don’t cause people to take action like real beliefs would, they are not going to affect how people vote or which elites they trust, etc.
Largely agree, but results like this (1) indicate that if AI does become more salient the public will be super concerned about risks and (2) might help nudge policy elites to be more interested in regulating AI. (And it’s not like there’s some other “real belief” that the survey fails to elicit—most people just don’t have ‘real beliefs’ on most topics.)
Well, maybe to both parts; it’s a good sign, but a weak one. Also concerns about response bias, etc., especially since YouGov doesn’t specialize in polling these types of questions and there’s no “ground truth” here to compare to.
This is an important warning but to be clear it also isn’t necessarily always the case. Rethink Priorities has studied low salience issue polling a lot and we think there are some good methods. I don’t think YouGov has been very good about using those methods here though.
I would caution people against reading too much into this. If you poll people about a concept they know nothing about (“AI will cause the end of the human race”) you will always get answers that don’t reflect real belief. These answers are very easily swayed, they don’t cause people to take action like real beliefs would, they are not going to affect how people vote or which elites they trust, etc.
Largely agree, but results like this (1) indicate that if AI does become more salient the public will be super concerned about risks and (2) might help nudge policy elites to be more interested in regulating AI. (And it’s not like there’s some other “real belief” that the survey fails to elicit—most people just don’t have ‘real beliefs’ on most topics.)
Well, maybe to both parts; it’s a good sign, but a weak one. Also concerns about response bias, etc., especially since YouGov doesn’t specialize in polling these types of questions and there’s no “ground truth” here to compare to.
This is an important warning but to be clear it also isn’t necessarily always the case. Rethink Priorities has studied low salience issue polling a lot and we think there are some good methods. I don’t think YouGov has been very good about using those methods here though.