[FRIAM] How soon until AI takes over polling?

[David Eric Smith]

Friam poll:

How soon until classical telephone polling is just gone?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/upshot/polls-what-went-wrong.html <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/upshot/polls-what-went-wrong.html>

If, as boasted, facebook knows when their users are pregnant before the users know, they know who someone supports and whether that person is likely to vote.  

At this stage, trying to get accurate statistics from cold calls on the phone seems as quixotic as trying to infer something from the people who read books.  But if there’s anything we can count on, it is that the number of people who don’t leave an internet fingerprint is too small to have any political impact at all.

How much effort they put into getting reliable calibrations will depend on what ways they see to monetize it, but the diversity of cash-outs should be nearly inexhaustible, for years to come.

So one more thing goes into what is both a black box and a private rather than public box.  It will take over after the first few times it produces much more reliable results, but since we won’t know what it is based on — AIs don’t explain themselves — we will have no ability to extrapolate out of sample.

Eric


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