Leogao

My original question asked whether the world would be better or worse if everyone had the freedom to work on whatever they want, as long as they want, and still enjoy a high quality of life, and anything we don't want to do is done for us by robots.

I thought maybe that set off some AI taking jobs bad instincts.

For the new question I took pains to clarify that the stuff is literally conjured out of nowhere with magic and is not taken from anyone else, and got an even worse result, 38% support, 34% oppose.

This is even more crazy, so I ran a third version on the hypothesis that people don't like magic, or that not having to work sounded too crazy.

This version asked whether it would be good if everyone made 10x more, inflation-adjusted, than they do currently.

This polled only somewhat better, with 39% in favour and 19% opposing.

I'm still pretty confused what conclusion to draw from this.

This is probably worth digging more into.

Tying back to the original question that started this quest, I had to know.

How much are Americans feeling the AGI?

I could of course ask if Americans know what AGI stands for, but some early results from asking random people on the street spatially and temporally further away from NeurIPS suggested that the number would round down to 0%.

So the more interesting question is.

Given a description of superhuman AI, do Americans think it's possible?

It turns out that when I first ran this poll in mid-2025, only 25% of people thought AGI would ever be possible.

That's only half a year ago in normal people time, but an unfathomably long time in A-Island, enough for empires to rise and fall, models to be deployed and obsoleted, and even a single entire ML conference review cycle to run its course.

Since then, more Americans have started feeling the AGI.

A recent rerun of this question came out 10 percentage points at 35%.

I'll see you all again in another half year for the follow-up.

Should we build the AGI though?

It turns out that people are extremely opposed to the idea of building super intelligent AI.