Do Americans Want More AI?
My dashboard provides automated, daily-updated survey responses to the prompt: 'I support further development of artificial intelligence.'
Surely, you’ve read my Dashboard Scientist Manifesto?
I wrote it back in COVID days. I was impressed with the many online dashboards that provided near real-time analysis of infections spreading. I thought, Why don’t we do that for all our science?
One reason is that it is kind of a pain. It’s expensive to collect data. Creating a nice dashboard requires time-consuming development. And you need a whole stack of skills from basic HTML to graduate-level statistics.
I did it anyway. To get started, I built weekly dashboards that I updated manually with a few hours of work each week. But the funding ran out, and so did my patience for a weekly chore. I decided to automate everything, and while I was at it, increase temporal resolution to daily.
My AI Support Daily Dashboard has now been running for 141 days.
I vastly prefer publishing my dashboard to traditional venues:
With a dashboard, results are instantly available free to the public.
The main product is a visualization - much faster to grok than thousands of words or dozens of numbers in a table.
If I made a mistake, I can fix it, rather than enshrine it forever in PDF form.
Rather than claiming a definitive, final answer that is immediately outdated, I get to see new results every day and update my beliefs accordingly.
The next step for this project will be addressing the question: Are Democrats and Republicans polarizing on AI Support? Preliminary results on the dashboard are intriguing. It might be that Republicans and Democrats are reversing their positions on support for AI development.
Trend or noise? New data arrives every day; accumulating hundreds of observations each month.