grantmaking.ai Launch Round
See detailed draft protocol here.
What we'll do and why
This project measures the US public's catastrophic risk tolerance. Prior public surveys have focused on attitudes and appetite for regulation. However, the public lack the AI literacy to knowledgeably prioritise risks, or to rate effective regulations. But, given AI imposes involuntary societal risks, the public do likely expect and deserve some say in the level of risk they are exposed to. So, we follow recommendations from Hadfield and Clark to separate the 'technical deficit' from the 'democratic deficit.' We reduce the democratic deficit by assessing the level of catastrophic risk the public are willing to tolerate. While this is hard to measure directly, we plan to triangulate four different methods for assessing their risk tolerance. We'll collected a representative sample of ~4,000 americans of voting age. Our prior work in Australia showed the public expect safety akin to commercial aviation. This would be orders of magnitude safer than expert forecasts imply for AI. If replicated in the USA, and confirmed with more robust methods, it would mean the status quo is intolerable by the public's lights.
Who's involved
The project would be led by the team at the MIT AI Risk Initiative (AIRI): Michael Noetel, Peter Slattery, and Alexander Saeri, supervised by MIT FutureTech lab director, Neil Thompson. AIRI is the number one result for 'AI risk' on Google and in ChatGPT. Our work has been widely cited in research papers, theses, curricula, reports, evidence submissions, presentations, and standards.
This grant would fund the survey recruitment costs and a research assistant to help with project delivery.
Concrete output
As per our Australian SARA2025 survey (self-funded by the researchers; examples from that project are linked), we will produce:
- A technical report of the survey results, following the preregistered analysis plan (data and code online for others to re-analyse and build upon)
- Write a two-page summary of the results
- Media and/or social media dissemination
Per our SARA2025 survey, we will publish all data regardless of what we find to maintain integrity and avoid selective reporting.
The min would cover the survey fielding costs for 4,000 US voters, and research assistant costs for 8 weeks.
The ideal also covers a UK sample and an additional 4 weeks of research assistant time.
Spreadsheet here
I like this idea and I value approaches that provide evidence for informed policy decisions.
I think there's value in being able to compare the results from your earlier Australian research with a comparable US / UK survey - and perhaps a formalised survey methodology that could be utilised in other countries to help build out some less English speaking / Western findings.
I'm not convinced that the public is good at estimating small risks, which is one of the issues that your methdology notes, and I agree that the findings are most useful in terms of direction.
I think your approach of making comparisons with other fields (eg regulation of air travel) is great, both as a way of making the risks and risk treatments more approachable for people, and also as potential media soundbites.