I'm curious about what people in the Manifold community think about AI.
This is just a simple self-identification poll - pick whichever category feels closest to where you're at right now.
The framework is pretty straightforward:
How much does AI interest you as a topic?
What's your general vibe about it - worried, neutral, or excited?
That gives us 9 different categories of people.
HIGH INTEREST - AI is a major topic of interest for me:
Doomer - "AI poses existential risk, we need to stop or slow down now"
Pragmatist - "We need smart regulation and safeguards"
Accelerationist - "AGI is coming soon, let's accelerate toward the future!"
MEDIUM INTEREST - I follow AI casually, it's one topic among many:
Worried - "What about job displacement and societal impacts?"
Observer - "I'm watching how this plays out, waiting to see"
Enthusiast - "AI tools are great for productivity and creativity!"
LOW INTEREST - AI is not a primary interest or priority for me:
Skeptic - "Another overhyped technology"
Indifferent - "I don't really think much about AI"
Optimist - "Technology generally works out fine, I'm not worried"
Note: This poll is meant to serve as a long-term reference point. The goal is to track how the community’s stance evolves over time, not just capture a one-off opinion.
1,000Just wanted to clarify what I was originally trying to do with this poll.
My original goal was to let people on Manifold create their own distribution of how they think the general population is split across these 9 AI perspective categories.
Basically, I wanted each person to say something like:
"I think 70% of people are Indifferent"
"15% are Worried"
"10% are Observers"
"5% are Enthusiasts"
With all 9 categories adding up to 100%.
The idea was to see what Manifold users collectively think about how society as a whole views AI not just how we personally view it. Like, what percentage of the people fall into each bucket?
Unfortunately, Manifold doesn't have a native feature that lets people submit a full distribution like that (where you input 9 different percentages that must sum to 100%). So I pivoted to this simpler self-identification poll instead.
But I'm still curious about the original question!
The key difference:
This poll: "Where do YOU personally stand?"
Original idea: "What % of humanity do you think falls into each category?"
Just wanted to clarify what I was originally trying to do with this poll.
My original goal was to let people on Manifold create their own distribution of how they think the general population is split across these 9 AI perspective categories.
Basically, I wanted each person to say something like:
"I think 70% of people are Indifferent"
"15% are Worried"
"10% are Observers"
"5% are Enthusiasts"
With all 9 categories adding up to 100%.
The idea was to see what Manifold users collectively think about how society as a whole views AI not just how we personally view it. Like, what percentage of the people fall into each bucket?
Unfortunately, Manifold doesn't have a native feature that lets people submit a full distribution like that (where you input 9 different percentages that must sum to 100%). So I pivoted to this simpler self-identification poll instead.
But I'm still curious about the original question!
The key difference:
This poll: "Where do YOU personally stand?"
Original idea: "What % of humanity do you think falls into each category?"