A country’s resistance to adopting artificial intelligence technologies is not always explained by the familiar fears of humanity’s destruction. Carl Benedikt Frey, an associate professor of AI and labor at the Oxford Internet Institute, explains in an article for Project Syndicate why AI means very different things in countries such as the UK and Bangladesh.
Are new Luddites a threat to AI?
America is not just the birthplace of the artificial intelligence revolution; it is also among the countries where people like the technology least. According to Ipsos’s AI Monitor 2026 report, 85% of respondents in China, 80% in India, and 77% in Indonesia believe that AI-powered products and services do more good than harm. In the United States, only 38% say so, and the share is just as low in Britain, France, and the Netherlands.
It is likely that these very sentiments will shape the adoption of this technology and its long-term impact on economic growth. In early 19th-century Britain, the Luddites famously destroyed mechanical looms, which they saw as a threat to their livelihoods. Parliament responded by making machine-breaking a capital offense. The army was sent to suppress the unrest, and Britain later became the “workshop of the world.”
By contrast, in China, craft guilds managed to block automation in the cotton, silk, and other industries until the early 20th century. Although there were many reasons why China failed to industrialize alongside Europe, economists Klaus Desmet, Avner Greif, and Stephen Parente identify the strength of organized artisans, who resisted the introduction of labor-displacing machinery, as a key factor.
Since any society that is unwilling to adopt new technology will be unable to benefit from it, it is worth exploring why the AI revolution is welcomed in some countries but resisted in others. The divide does not simply run along an East–West line, since in Japan only half of respondents see more benefits than drawbacks in AI.
And the reason is not the apocalyptic outlook characteristic of Silicon Valley. In the latest Survey of Expert Opinion on Progress in AI (published in September), the median AI researcher estimated the likelihood that this technology would cause human extinction or a comparably serious loss of control at 10%. Yet researchers educated in Asia rated these risks higher than those educated in North America or Europe. Experts who know the technology best in the region of the world most optimistic about AI are more concerned about it than their Western counterparts. This means that optimism about AI cannot be explained by an inability to consider what might go wrong.
Perhaps it all comes down to perceptions of economic risk? If wealthy countries are more attached to the status quo, they may have more to lose from disruption caused by this technology. But better-educated, higher-income Americans are more enthusiastic about AI, not less. According to a 2025 Quinnipiac poll, 60% of American households earning more than $200,000 a year expect AI to bring more benefits than harms to their daily lives, while only 26% of those earning less than $50,000 a year share this view. But the picture reverses when countries are compared: several middle-income countries are among the most optimistic, while Americans, Germans, and Canadians are among the most worried.
Perhaps the reason is not income levels, but the pace of economic growth in recent years? Hundreds of millions of people in Asian countries are seeing their incomes rise, while Americans, Europeans, and Japanese have been complaining for decades about stagnant wages and the decline of industrial cities; they fear their children will have a worse life than they did. Together with her co-authors, Stefanie Stantcheva of Harvard University found that the higher the rate of economic growth people observed while growing up, the less likely they were to see the world as a zero-sum game. If one group’s gain is another group’s loss, then technology that changes the nature of work becomes a threat.
This is largely true. But in some fast-growing economies, including Poland and Ireland, enthusiasm for AI is lower than in Spain and Italy, where growth is much slower; meanwhile, Argentina and South Africa are among the most optimistic countries, despite having seen an entire generation grow up amid economic stagnation.
The uneven distribution of AI
The most plausible explanation is this: AI means very different things depending on what a society already has. In wealthy countries, it competes with people’s costly knowledge and experience; but when introduced in other countries, it brings knowledge and expertise that were not available there before. When interacting with an AI assistant, a patient in Lyon, France, compares it with a doctor she could visit, while a patient in the Sahel can compare it only with the services of a hospital very far away—or, more likely, has nothing to compare it with at all.
The consequences for the labor market will also be very different. In major Western hubs like London and New York, the main concern is that generative AI will reduce the earnings of lawyers and accountants, whose hard-won expertise is no longer scarce thanks to this technology. But a rice farmer in the Indian state of Bihar who has never seen an agronomist in his life faces entirely different prospects. What could he dislike about an AI system that monitors weather forecasts, soil conditions, crop diseases, and market prices to advise him what to plant and when to water, and to answer questions like whether a yellowing leaf is a sign of infection? In this case, AI is not replacing anyone on the farm. It is becoming the expert farmers never had.
But perhaps more importantly, numerous studies show that AI narrows the productivity gap between novices and experts, which could trigger a new wave of offshoring to countries whose citizens are most enthusiastic about it. GPS technology once freed us from having to memorize the names of every street and enabled anyone with a driver’s license to work for Uber, forcing professional taxi drivers to accept a pay cut of around 10%.
Many professional services are now experiencing their own “Uber moment,” but there is one important difference: unlike a taxi ride, intellectual work can be imported. The opportunities for wage arbitrage could be enormous. In New York, an accountant at a Big Four firm earns $76,000 a year, while in Cairo the figure is $3,000. As machine translation erases the language barriers that previously limited offshoring to English-speaking countries, work can now be moved almost anywhere.
And we are already seeing it happen. Citing the adoption of AI, law firm Clifford Chance laid off a tenth of its business services staff in London and moved the work to cheaper offices in India. Meanwhile, in Britain, the Big Four firms have cut graduate recruitment by almost a third since 2023, while increasing hiring in India, Malaysia, and the Philippines. In other words, the losers are young Western graduates, who are already among the most pessimistic about AI. Like the Luddites, they are not irrational enemies of progress. They simply understand that it is not in their interests.
However, the Industrial Revolution and China’s experience are reminders that such sentiments can have long-term consequences. Although Britain dealt with the Luddites in its day using troops and gallows, it is unlikely that the West will take a similar approach to those resisting the adoption of AI. To achieve an AI-driven productivity boom, the countries developing this technology must ensure that it benefits the people it directly threatens.