10  Leading a Golden Age of Surveys

The promise I made at the beginning of this book was to answer the question:

What did Americans think about the dawn of the Generative AI Age?

I will deliver on that promise in the next and final chapter.

First, though, let me tell you about the time I decided to create a golden age and how that went.

10.1 The path toward a golden age of opinion survey data

When I began conducting opinion surveys, I copied the methods that were familiar to me. Specifically, I ran one-shot surveys with observations massed over a short period of time. This approach has one strong advantage — one gains a clear snapshot of the population at one moment in time.

But the research questions I was most interested in answering involved change over time. I needed my observations spread out over the calendar. In the case of AI and public opinion, I was trying to catch a moment. Specifically, I wanted to capture the before and after of the artificial intelligence Three Mile Island or its China Syndrome. I was fairly sure there would be some public AI freakout event, but I had no idea when it would happen.

That is why I built AI Daily by Jason Jeffrey Jones Productions

The idea was to do the opposite of one-shot, massed survey snapshots. Instead, I wanted to capture many frames in the movie of public opinion on AI.

I was accustomed to daily data from my hobby of stock watching and my professional work researching social media. I looked into commissioning daily surveys from commercial providers and quickly discovered that would not be possible in my budget. So I decided to build my own daily survey system.

The Social Science Dashboard Inator was the result. I wrote code to combine all the necessary parts: online surveys, respondent recruitment, and data distribution.

I named the first dashboard AI Daily by Jason Jeffrey Jones Productions and began collecting data daily in April, 2024. The main goal was to measure support and opposition to further development of artificial intelligence. The headline result? AI Support increased from February 2024 through April 2025, then began a slide toward opposition that continued through 2026.

TODO a static image here of an updated segmented regression result.

10.2 Dashboarding Public Perception of AI

What does AI Daily by Jason Jeffrey Jones Productions accomplish?

In Covid-19 times, I consulted online dashboards every day. I wanted to know the prevalence of new cases in the US, in New York, in my county. It was reassuring to know cases were being tracked and comforting to see the growth slow, stop and reverse into decline. It made me wonder why (as a computational social scientist focused on big data) there was nothing like that to be found in my professional life.

I decided to turn my sporadic survey habit into a daily ritual. I invested the time to write code to automate that daily ritual. My publishing company invested the money to pay survey respondents. Now the same survey has run TODO times. TODO American adults have expressed their level of AI Support — more than TODO per year, or TODO each month.

Just like presidential approval tracks the population’s attitude toward the President, my survey tracks the population’s attitude toward artificial intelligence. Call it an AI Vibe Check. Even if it weren’t my own creation, it would be my favorite data source, due to all these positive features:

  • Consistency. The survey stays the same. Comparisons across time and groups are apples-to-apples.
  • Persistence. New data arrives daily. There’s no wait for future funding or others’ attention.
  • Transparency. Anonymized microdata is free to download. My analysis code is open source. Anyone can replicate, remix and extend what I’ve built.
  • Automated. This one is huge. Most days, I am busy with other things, and I don’t think about the survey or results at all. And yet, new data and results accumulate!

10.3 Generalization: the Ryerson Project to Nowcast Everything Daily

Estimating AI Support in the American population is cool. But you know what would be really cool? Nowcasting Everything Daily. Let me explain.

TODO define nowcast

Here I will present the Ryerson Project.

10.4 Analysis, Visualization and Interpretation

TODO everything

  • Segmented result
  • Polarization results
  • Age x Time interaction result. Figure out a visualization!

10.5 Survey Items, Respondents and Costs

10.5.1 Survey Items

TODO

10.5.2 Respondents

TODO

10.5.3 Costs

TODO

10.6 Open Data and Code

Data for every chapter in this book can be found at the Thinking Machines, Pondering Humans data repository. Also available at this Zenodo mirror.

R code for analysis and visualization is embedded above (some formats) or available at TODO GITHUB/ZENODO.

10.7 Summary and What’s Next

TODO