This week I'm digging into one of the most fascinating trends about AI – the fact that people in the "Western World" (U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia) seem to have a much more negative view of AI than the rest of the world.
The data:
64% of Americans say they're "nervous" about AI, per Ipsos. That's about the same as folks in India (63%).
The difference is that 79% of India is excited too, while only 33% of Americans are.
What separates us isn’t being concerned about possible negative outcomes. That's roughly a constant. What varies is whether people think something positive might come out of this technological shift, too.
Call it the AI hope gap.
Today, I'm focusing on the gap between countries. Next week, I'll look at a similar gap between age groups and generations.
Most countries are nervous, but their excitement varies dramatically.
The Ipsos AI Monitor 2026 asked 23,532 adults across 32 countries whether AI made them excited, and whether it made them nervous.
The range of "nervousness" scores is 27 points across those eight countries. For "excitement," the gap is much wider – 57 points.
Thailand is 61% nervous and 77% excited at once; India, 63% and 79%. "Nervous and excited" basically describes my personal emotional state, too.
So it’s not that Americans, Canadians and Brits are a lot more nervous relative to other countries — it’s that we’re nervous without corresponding excitement.
54% of Indians think AI will improve the job market. In the UK, it’s 14%.
Same survey, on the job market three to five years out:
China 55%, India 54%, Peru 50%, Thailand 45% say it will be better
That's much lower in the Anglosphere: United States 18%, Great Britain 14%, Canada 11%
On whether benefits outweigh drawbacks: China 85%, India 80%, Indonesia 77%. The US, UK and Canada land between 34% and 38%.
Similar results in another survey: Pew’s 25-country survey found a similar directional pattern using a different measure: 50% of Americans were more concerned than excited about AI, compared with 19% in India.
So why is the country with less money (to put it crudely) more excited about AI?
Well, AI is disruptive.
Disruption is much better for people who are in 4th, 5th or 10th place than for the current leader.
The citizens in the more enthusiastic countries generally want their status quo changed, and they are more likely to see technology as “a shortcut to fix the systems.”
Which is a thing my home state of Colorado already voted on, in a much different context.
In November 2024 we passed Proposition 129, creating a job that hadn’t existed anywhere in the country: the veterinary professional associate. A VPA earns a master’s degree, works under a licensed vet, and can diagnose and perform routine surgery. A physician assistant, for animals. It passed with 52.75% of the vote and took effect this year.
The Colorado and American Veterinary Medical Associations opposed it. Their core claim was that it would put pets in danger because the new VPAs would have less training hours than vets. I suspect another incentive was at work too: expanding the supply of people authorized to perform veterinary services inevitably reduces some of the scarcity value attached to the incumbent credential.
From my perspective as a cat, dog and backyard chicken owner, it’s a huge win. Colorado is one of the most dog-loving and nature-loving states and demand for veterinary services is crazy high here. More supply of veterinary help is a win for the everyday person.
More, cheaper veterinary services = a win for the pups!
The key here is that people are looking at the identical policy from different perspectives. To a practicing vet, it lowers the barrier to a profession that took them four years and a small fortune to enter. To me, it means faster and perhaps even cheaper veterinary services.
Now put AI in place of that ballot measure. The typical office worker or professional in the US, Canada and the UK is basically the veterinarian who already has the credential — maybe that’s a college degree or your job experience or your communication skills.
Meanwhile, the folks aspiring to the middle class in India and Indonesia are the ones who stand to benefit from lowering the barrier to entry for a lucrative and prestigious career.
And at the same time, lots of folks in those countries will also benefit from faster, cheaper and better services that are powered by AI. So the countries that are currently "developing" or "lower-income" get a double-win: more job opportunities and more access to potentially cheaper services.
What if AI is good for the world and mediocre for America?
Take these numbers at face value for a minute. If the excitement we see in places like India and Indonesia ends up being correct, a very large number of people are about to get legal advice, medical triage, tutoring and software they could never previously afford. If the less enthusiastic Americans are right, it’s roughly a wash here, or worse.
Both can be true at once, which creates kind of a fascinating moral question around AI:
Whose gains do we care about?
Every policy runs into this eventually. Is a win for a family in Jakarta or Manila worth the same as a win for a family in Denver? If you say yes, you have to be willing to accept a technology that raises the global average while leaving your own situation flat.
I think we should value those two wins almost the same. I don’t get to weight my own comfort at 10 times someone else’s just because we were born in different places. Maybe there's a small "local-ness premium" that's fair, but it's certainly not unlimited.
That doesn’t make the American story less real or our white-collar job market less challenging. But looking at the whole board, “hundreds of millions of people get better opportunities and/or expertise that used to cost $300 an hour” is a pretty impressive outcome.
The 79% aren’t just optimists. They’re participants.
Look at what sits underneath the excitement. Asked whether AI saved them time at work in the past year, 90% of workers in China said yes. Indonesia 85%, India 83%. The US: 49%, near the bottom of all 32 countries.
The enthusiasm isn’t a national personality trait or purely a result of better press coverage. It’s downstream of people picking the thing up and getting something out of it.
That’s the closest thing to a prescription I’ve got: pivot, learn, build.
It’s the difference between an external and an internal locus of control. Refusing to learn AI, boycotting it, waiting for regulation to sort it out: those are all forms of waiting, letting other people decide for you. I understand the impulse. It just rarely works in reality.
I’ve written software for 20 years. Coding was one of the first things AI took.
The daily work of coding, the actual typing of functions, is one of the first professional tasks AI substantially replaced. I spent 20 years building a skill that doesn’t pencil out the way it used to, and plenty of you are in the same position with a different skill.
So when I talk to a 23-year-old about this, or a 45-year-old whose specialty just got cheaper, I’m not sending news from a safe distance.
What I tell them is what I had to tell myself: go where the growth is instead of defending the ground you already hold. The CVMA fought Prop 129 and lost, and even if they’d won, Colorado would still be short of veterinarians. Defending a credential against a technological shift has a terrible track record. Building on top of the shift has a much better one.