Fragments: March 26

Anthropic carried a study, done by getting its model to interview some 80,000 users to understand their opinions about AI, what they hope from it, and what they fear. Two things stood out to me. It’s easy to assume there are AI optimists and AI pessimists, divided into separate camps. But what we actually found were people organized around what they value—financial security, learning, human connection— watching advancing AI capabilities while managing both hope and fear at once. That makes sense, if asked whether I’m a an AI booster or an AI doomer, I answer “yes”. I am both fascinated by its impact on my profession, expectant of the benefits it will bring to our world, and worried by the harms that will come from it. Powerful technologies rarely yield simple consequences. The other thing that struck me was that, despite most people mixing the two, there was an overall variance between optimism and pessimism with AI by geography. In general, the less developed the country, the more opt