{"text":[[{"start":5.92,"text":"Three months ago, I found myself in a glitzy new bookstore in the centre of Xi’an, the ancient Chinese city, talking about the global economy. At the end, an articulate young Chinese woman posed a question: “Is artificial intelligence going to take all our jobs?”"}],[{"start":21.76,"text":"It sounded wearily familiar. Barely a week goes by in America without chatter about an “AI-pocalyse”, angst that AI might wipe out jobs, unleash cyber attacks or worse. And, as this week’s US midterm elections showed, there is such potent opposition to data centres that a majority of voters said this was a key factor in shaping their vote, according to NBC, and politicians have pledged moratoriums."}],[{"start":44.919,"text":"This is framed in environmental terms. But surveys show that Americans accept other energy-guzzling buildings, like Amazon distribution centres. “There is strong revealed preference against AI relative to older digital services,” says Patrick Ruffini, a pollster. In plain English: American voters hate it."}],[{"start":64.48,"text":"However China is different. When an FT reporter recently visited a data centre project in Shaoguan, for example, he also found unease — but this was primarily about whether local villagers would also enjoy economic benefits, not opposition to AI in general. I found a similar pattern myself in China: questions about jobs were outweighed by a sense of excitement."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":86.64,"text":"Or as Bing Song, a Chinese academic who is now president of the Berggruen Institute, tells me: “You will hear fears of job loss, the erosion of human subjectivity, and a loss of meaning [in China] much as you do in the US and elsewhere. But there is far less existential fear than we see in the US and in western mainstream media.” Surveys bear this out: China, along with much of Asia, is dramatically more optimistic than America about the upside of AI, and less worried about the risks. Europe is more pessimistic, but also less concerned about the dangers than America."}],[{"start":118.4,"text":"Some might put this down to repression. As Kevin Rudd, the former Australian prime minister, points out, Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, views AI development as core to China’s future and is increasingly authoritarian too. It is thus hard for ordinary Chinese to protest AI."}],[{"start":135.84,"text":"However, fear alone does not explain the attitudinal gap. Democracies such as Japan and South Korea are also very optimistic. So are most emerging markets, regardless of whether they are autocratic or democratic. When I recently co-convened a large group of global regulators in Cambridge to discuss how to use agentic AI for government services, it was striking that many western representatives fretted about how to garner public support — but the emerging markets ones did not. The event included a hackathon, which was won by an Indian team."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":167.6,"text":"“Our people are excited,” a top official from the United Arab Emirates told me, noting that the UAE plans to use agentic AI for half of all government services by 2028 but that this has not (yet) sparked any protests. And James Manyika, senior vice-president at Google-Alphabet (who was born in Zimbabwe), says he saw a similar split when he co-led AI debates in the UN. “It is not fair to say that the global south is free of concerns about AI. [But] research shows that attitudes in the global south tend to be far more positive.”"}],[{"start":198.48,"text":"So the key point to understand is that American hostility towards AI is not universal — even if the US currently shapes the global discourse. But, as Democrats take control of Congress — and have more influence over AI policy — we should ask: why does this gap exist? And what might we learn from each other?"}],[{"start":217.12,"text":"There are two possible ways to explain the attitudinal split: tangible differences in hard economics and public policy; and/or pre-existing cultural patterns."}],[{"start":225.76,"text":"To start with the first: one factor that clearly shapes the public mood is demography. In countries such as Japan and South Korea, there is a looming shortage of workers and distrust of immigrants, which makes it easier for voters to accept automation. However, America faces a less acute demographic shrinkage, so less economic incentive to champion robots."}],[{"start":247.042,"text":"Relative wealth matters too. In mature western countries, which rely heavily on the service sector, voters fear that AI will wipe out white-collar work, leading to a worse future than the past. However, many Asian countries have recently experienced rising economic prosperity due to technological progress, which fosters more positivity. Many poor countries are keen to catch up — and some think AI might level the playing field by enabling them to deliver far more healthcare and education. “It all depends on what you have got to lose,” as a top African central banker told me at the Cambridge conference."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":282.08,"text":"Public policy also varies. In countries such as America, AI profits are making elites richer and there has been little effort to redistribute that wealth. “Voters are mad at the tech bros,” Steve Bannon, a Maga strategist, has told me. The US government and Big Tech have also failed to roll out any co-ordinated set of policies to train workers in AI tools, or find them new jobs if AI displaces them; people are expected to navigate the challenges on their own."}],[{"start":309.44,"text":"Elsewhere, government rhetoric stresses the public good from AI (even if the reality differs), and is intervening more visibly and heavily to protect people. In countries such as Japan, say, companies are trying to train workers (although actual corporate AI adoption rates are still low). In Singapore, the government is imparting cradle-to-grave AI skills, fighting misinformation and combating job displacement, particularly among new graduates."}],[{"start":335.36,"text":"“What governments did to support the first job, as a crisis measure during Covid, and what some governments did during the global financial crisis, now has to be part of the menu of structural policies that governments have,” Tharman Shanmugaratnam, president of Singapore, told a meeting of the IMF and World Bank last month. “There has to be a public-private collaboration, with the public sector incentivising the private sector to take in fresh graduates.” Such language — and policies — are notably missing in much of the west. No wonder people are scared."}],[{"start":365.2,"text":"A second way to explain the attitudinal gap lies in societies’ shared social fabric and worldview — in other words, culture. Economists or technologists rarely study this, since culture is slippery. Moreover, national “cultures” never exist like sealed Tupperware boxes. They are more akin to slow-moving rivers with muddy banks, where new streams constantly flow in. They change."}],[{"start":390.68,"text":"However, cultural differences matter deeply, since our attitudes towards AI are shaped not just by our vision of technology, but our ideas about what it means to be human. “In the west there is a distinctive view that AI will either be enormously positive or apocalyptically negative,” says Stephen Cave, a former UK diplomat who co-edited Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines. “Other cultures view AI quite differently.”"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":415.383,"text":"Why? Religion is one factor. When the Pope recently issued his encyclical on AI, he assumed that humans are separate from machines — and only humans possess souls. Hence why his encyclical is called “Magnifica Humanitas”. This reflects Judeo-Christian theology in recent centuries, which assumes a boundary between animate and inanimate beings."}],[{"start":435.84,"text":"In truth, this oppositional frame has not always existed: as the British theologian Joanna Leidenhag notes in her book Minding Creation, early Christian thought included “panpsychism”, which saw humans entwined with nature. And some modern Silicon Valley titans, such as Peter Thiel, are such fans of AI-human interaction that they use Christian language to dismiss critics as “false messiahs and false prophets”. However, the oppositional split in more recent Christian thought has infused the anglophone media culture’s overwhelmingly negative presentation of robots, long before agentic AI attacks on the open-source AI platform Hugging Face. Just think of movies such as The Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey or Ex Machina."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":478.446,"text":"Not so elsewhere. In Japan, say, arguably the best-known robot in popular culture is the cartoon character Astro Boy (known in Japan as Mighty Atom), a cute helpmate for humans launched in the 1950s. Its creator — Osamu Tezuka, the artist who created modern manga — noted that Japanese attitudes towards robots reflected the country’s religious heritage, which does not use binary terms to define humans, but instead views everything as interconnected, possessing kami, or spiritual essence."}],[{"start":508.206,"text":"If you think that rocks and trees have kami, it is less threatening to see a machine acting like a person. Hence why research shows that Japanese citizens have long been more willing to accept humanoid robots."}],[{"start":519.714,"text":"And echoes of this interconnected mindset are found in Buddhist and Hindu traditions too, along with China’s Confucian concept of tian-di-ren (or heaven, earth, humans)."}],[{"start":529.738,"text":"“In this [Confucian] framework, humans live and thrive within the broader and dynamically evolving cosmos; they never sit atop or apart from the rest of the world,” says Bing. “Technology is internal to humans, reflects the human mind and we are co-evolving with the technology — it is not an alien force external to us.” This is echoed in how the Chinese government talks about AI."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":552.64,"text":"Another important cultural factor is how we imagine human agency. In 2010, Joseph Henrich, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard, posited that a gap existed between cultures that are “Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic” (ie Weird), and those that are not. More recently, social psychologists have used this concept to explore different levels of so-called “algorithm aversion”. A 2023 paper by Nicole Tsz Yeung Liu, Samuel N Kirshner and Eric TK Lim, for example, notes that “organisations in non-Weird emerging economies” with collectivist ethos, such as India and China, often appear to be adopting AI more rapidly, and with less hostility, than in individualist cultures."}],[{"start":598.407,"text":"Why? One theory is that Weird cultures dislike robots because “individualists may be more prone to view AI as external to the self and interpret AI features to infringe upon their uniqueness, autonomy, and privacy,” as another paper posits, by the academics Aaron Barnes, Yuanyuan Zhang and Ana Valenzuela. “In contrast, collectivists may be more prone to view AI as an extension of the self and interpret AI features to facilitate conforming to consensus.”"}],[{"start":627.84,"text":"Another theory revolves around privacy. When researchers recently compared discussions about AI on X and (the Chinese platform) Weibo, they noticed that “US people express more concerns about AI privacy, focusing more on privacy disclosure by AI applications” — but “Chinese people are more optimistic about AI’s role in promoting privacy protection”. The authors argue this is because the Chinese define privacy as something that helps them fend off commercial manipulation and fraud."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":655.296,"text":"A third theory focuses on trust. Noah Castelo, a psychologist in Canada, has noted from his research that “participants who are born or raised in countries with high levels of perceived corruption are much less averse to algorithmic decision-making, relative to those from countries with low perceived corruption”. That might sound odd. However, our readiness to trust machines partly depends on whether or not we think that humans are more trustworthy than those robots. In western cultures with a strong rule of law, human officials may seem credible. Not so elsewhere."}],[{"start":687.828,"text":"When Ken Anderson, an anthropologist then attached to Intel, studied facial recognition technologies in China in 2017-19, he found that Chinese citizens did not mind dealing with robots, since they liked the convenience and the fact that visual recognition tools looked at them as individuals, not numbers. “In a curious way [in China] facial recognition technologies highlight the individual, a hallmark of western culture,” he noted. Moreover, he told me, Chinese citizens seemed to think the robots were fair; or, more accurately, less biased than the human bureaucrats in China had previously been. Our attitude to tech is thus derivative of our views on people; if we do not trust humans, we might prefer to deal with AI instead."}],[{"start":731.2,"text":"There are big caveats to such explanations, of course, most notably that social attitudes inside societies vary, and they can shift in response to policy changes or external influences. Consider, once again, the research that Anderson did into facial recognition technology for Intel. When he started this, almost a decade ago, his brief was to explore why Americans seemed instinctively more hostile towards facial recognition tools than Chinese citizens. So he observed people in schools, residential units and police departments in both China and the US, and concluded that Americans viewed facial recognition tools as intrusive, demeaning and a threat to individual liberty."}],[{"start":772.88,"text":"However, soon after the Intel study began, Apple launched its first smartphone with facial recognition tools — a product that was quickly embraced by American consumers because they, like Chinese consumers, liked the convenience. American culture appeared to change."}],[{"start":786.219,"text":"Could this happen again? Perhaps. Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist and so-called godfather of AI, thinks it may soon be time for westerners to accept how humans and machines are entwined. “My belief is that, if we have a soul, so do these alien beings,” he told an audience in Cambridge this week, arguing that humans needed to control them “like a mother and baby” given how dangerous they could be."}],[{"start":813.082,"text":"Separately, if Anglo-Saxon governments — and Big Tech companies — announced proper measures to protect their citizens, be that from job losses, inequality or existential risks, there might be less public opposition to AI. So, too, if governments acted with force to regulate the tech. Researchers think that one reason Europeans are less worried about existential dangers from AI (even while being pessimistic about the impact on jobs) is a higher level of trust in Europe around regulation. In America, by contrast, President Donald Trump has opposed regulation of AI — and derided people who protest against data centres as wanting to stay “backwards and poor”."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":851.206,"text":"Conversely, if a big AI accident happens, such as a cyber attack on essential infrastructure, citizens in Asian and emerging-market countries could become as hostile to AI as American citizens. So, too, if it turns out that AI displaces emerging-market jobs as fast as those in the developed world, or if AI fails to enable poorer countries and communities to leapfrog others in an economic sense."}],[{"start":872.72,"text":"Either way, the key point is that public attitudes towards AI — both good and bad — are not set in stone. Instead, they reflect wider assumptions about what it means to be human — assumptions that vary enormously around the world and constantly shift. Therein lies the beauty of our all-too-human nature. “AI is neither all good or all bad. But aligning AI with desirable human values requires that we first cultivate those values in ourselves,” says Bing. “We should embrace paradoxes, reflect more on ourselves, and point fewer fingers.”"}],[{"start":911.04,"text":"To put it another way: in an age when we are being told to learn from the machines, we might start by learning some lessons from other humans first. Let us hope Democrat policymakers are willing to do that. And so, too, American techies."}],[{"start":924.081,"text":"Gillian Tett is an FT columnist, provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and co-host of the FT podcast ‘The Story of Money’"}],[{"start":931.968,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning"}],[{"start":946.5,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1794029905_4529.mp3"}