Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
Walter Lippmann
Ask someone what they think about AI and you get a headline back. It's going to take the jobs. It's stealing from artists. It's going to cure cancer. It's going to end the world. None of these are opinions. They are things people have heard.
We built this site because the interesting question is one level down. Almost nobody thinks borrowing a book from the library is theft. Almost nobody thinks a cover band is theft. So at what point does a machine doing the same thing become theft? When it reads ten million books? When it never buys one? When what it writes competes with the people it read? Every one of those is a real line, and everyone draws it somewhere. Most people have never been asked where.
So the exchange asks. Every market opens with a scenario you'll answer without thinking. Then it changes one variable. The art student becomes a machine. The hobbyist's desk becomes a warehouse. The pause button pauses the cure too. Nine questions later you hold a position you didn't know you had, and a receipt for how you got there.
The prices are the other half. The moment you answer, the market shows where America trades on the same question, in cents, straight from Pew, Gallup, YouGov and the rest. Not because the crowd is right. Because finding out you're with the 17% is more interesting than finding out you're with the 71%, and because the country's mind on this is stranger than either party's talking points. Three quarters of American voters think AI could threaten the human race. Democrats and Republicans are within three points of each other. It may be the last thing the country agrees on.
Some rules we hold ourselves to. Both sides get their best card: the fifty-cent jailbreak and the RAND null result, the bottle-of-water headline and the five-drops measurement. Prices come from named polls; where no poll exists we say so and let the visitors set the price. Your answers are stored as anonymous aggregate rows, nothing more. There are no accounts, no tracking, no ads. The verdicts are wry and a little brutal, but the goal is that you feel seen, not graded. And when you contradict yourself, the exchange never says you're wrong. It says: that's a real position. Own it.
We don't know what you think about AI. Neither, probably, do you. Nine questions.
HOW THE EXCHANGE WORKS
- Every question is a binary, the kind you'd argue about at dinner. No policy jargon, just art students, cover bands, and off switches.
- The moment you answer, the market reveals itself: where America trades the same question, priced in cents, straight from Pew, Gallup, YouGov, and friends.
- You close at a price on the spectrum, get your verdict, and see yourself plotted against the country and against everyone who took the market before you.
- Complete all four open markets and The Recruiter issues your offer letter: the AI lab you actually trade like, from Anthropic to DeepSeek. Argue with it publicly.
METHOD & SOURCES
Market prices are calibrated to published US polling, 2024 to 2026. Questions without a direct poll are marked “floor est.” and replaced by live visitor prices once twenty people have answered. The blue curve on every result is a synthetic population fitted to the cited polls; the teal curve is real visitors. Every market page carries its receipts: each fact, each poll, each source, under “The receipts.” The Daily Open is written each morning by a language model from the day's news and is labeled as such.