[FRIAM] How soon until AI takes over polling?

[jon zingale]

My flippant first approximation answer is: once there are fewer boomers.
While the national polls likely used no AI anywhere in their pipeline, I
suspect that any organization with *real money* on the line designed
predictive models making heavy use of AI and not bothering with telephones
for the data. Black boxes trade reliably and quickly on the stock market
floor, no serious go or chess player questions the supremacy of AlphaZero,
and for those concerned about "government work", significant advancements
are being made on understanding "the why" of these boxes (did anyone else
read the *Derivative of a Turing Machine* paper this way?).

While the government flailed about publicly unsure as to what the pandemic
would mean, while many of us waited for in-browser javascript models to
infer with, while arm-chair experts talked ad nauseam about the
impossibility of getting the parameter space under control, I suspect those
with billions on the line (like Google) did the calculations, and like an
iPhone that *witnesses* a rape or a murder, but reports nothing, these
models are kept private so as to not tempt accountability (much of the
content of the anti-trust hearings was of the form: should Facebook be the
rightful stewards of free speech?). Meanwhile, Google announces that her
workers will not return to their offices until the summer of 2021, and while
I may never know why this decision was made, I believe that my own
predictions ought to follow suit.



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