Carl Frey: 85% in China see AI as beneficial vs 38% in US — resistance maps to expertise costs
carlbfrey · x · 2026-11-02
Oxford economist Carl Benedikt Frey argues in Project Syndicate that AI means very different things depending on what a society already has. The US is both the home of the AI revolution and among the places where people like AI least: Ipsos's 2026 AI Monitor finds 85% of respondents in China, 80% in India and 77% in Indonesia think AI products offer more benefits than drawbacks, versus only 38% in the US, with similarly low shares in Britain, France and the Netherlands.
His core argument: in rich economies AI competes with expensive human expertise and meets resistance; elsewhere it supplies expertise that was never available and is welcomed. AI resistance is more complex than headline poll data suggest.
Related event: 85% of Chinese optimistic about AI, only 38% of Americans: survey(2 posts)→
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