Honestly I was workshoping “unfucking the goose” as a way to say some things can’t be unmade. Like nuclear weapons or LLM’s. It seems like I’ll need to keep looking for another weird idiom to express the idea, the goose seems to be distracting.

You seem to be doing everything in your power to miss my point and putting words in my mouth about the issue. To state it more clearly AI is not like cfc’s in hairspray, it’s like nuclear weapons. CFC’s had a cheap alternative that was just as effective, AI doesn’t. Personally I don’t see the benefits for AI but as the article and poll suggest a lot of people do. We’re not going to get rid of it, because the will is not there and the hypothetical benefits are too alluring for the capitalists and their fascist cronies that run the world.

I don’t like AI, I think the technology is way overhyped and the potential dangers could be civilization ending so it’s not worth the risk. I understand you seem to be of the impression that if you belittle and badger people who broadly agree with you on probably 90% of the issues that will somehow translate into lawmakers regulating the tech or AI enthusiasts losing their excitement. Where we disagree seems to be at whether or not the technology can be gotten rid of, but it’s more like nuclear weapons and climate change control than leaded gas and cfc’s in that the people who hold the power want the tech and they can’t get the proposed benefits elsewhere, even if they have not yet manifested, if they ever do.

What makes you think I’m pro-AI? Because I don’t think 1,000 people are enough to represent the opinions of countries with populations ranging from 10 million to upwards of 350 million? Gallup says they want to survey India too, is 1,000 people enough to represent the opinions of over a billion people? It’s how most polling is done, but it’s still not a large enough sample size to be representative and the data science tricks still leave large margins of error according to the research. Did you read the article or the poll I linked? The results of the poll were that most of the world is in favor of AI and enthusiastic about it despite what US citizens may want or think.

I’m not pro-AI at all, but I also realize that you can’t unfuck the goose, especially if the neighbors are much more enthusiastic about it than the US is. In regards to the technology I would like to see laws that make AI companies liable for crimes committed by their products, laws that require companies to pay extended unemployment benefits for workers displaced by AI, and a tax on companies creating or utilizing AI or owning even a single share of those that do that would go to fund reeducation for displaced workers. I’d also like to see a law where media created, even partially, by AI can’t be copyrighted. Right now it’s just a somewhat precarious (of being overturned) judicial ruling.

The survey paints a different picture in the rest of the world, however. In Singapore, which had the highest portion of daily users in the study (46%), more than 80% of those aware about AI expect the tech to improve their everyday lives, and 77% think it’ll help the country. In China, where 35% of people report using AI daily, most people expect it to help the country. The story is similar in Israel.

The article’s title kind of cherry picks the results, which centers the survey around US interests. However large swathes of the world are very much pro-AI, which puts the prevailing anti-AI sentiment in the US at odds with global trends. It also highlights an interesting problem anti-AI advocates aren’t really exploring. It’s less so about some arms race between countries over the technology and more to do with a difference of global opinion. Even if efforts to slow down or stop AI progress in the US were successful, the desire to is not shared by our global neighbors.

Still, optimism about AI doesn’t necessarily appear to translate to trust in the tech’s accuracy. According to Gallup, people who use AI daily were generally more trusting of its results, especially in high-adoption countries like Singapore, Israel, and China, while less frequent users remain skeptical across the board. In the U.S., only 45% of daily users expressed that level of confidence. Altogether, only 36% (median) of the people surveyed said they trust AI’s results a lot.

It would be somewhat alarming if that wasn’t the case. If people who used it more trusted it less, that would indicate some dire faults in AI systems efficacy that could lead to major problems in the future.

Commissioned by Microsoft, the Gallup study currently has results from 37 countries, where researchers polled about 1,000 people in each country between April and July.

There are some data science tricks researchers use to make such a small sample size more representative, but even so 1,000 people is such an infinitesimally small sample size there isn’t much nuance to be had. Certainly the results are worth being moderately skeptical about. The article also doesn’t actually link to the actual poll which tells a somewhat different story.