Foreign Policy: China's 87% AI trust reflects culture gap

A poll published last November found that 87 percent of people in China say they trust AI, compared with 32 percent in the United States. Foreign Policy's James Palmer argues the gap is less about hardware or capability than about which cultural tradition each side reaches for when it imagines the technology.

In Palmer's reading, "China's approach to AI situates the technology within a long tradition of cybernetics," the study of circular flows and self-adjustment within systems. "In China," he writes, "AI is treated as a bureaucratic technology, merely another way of coordinating and controlling systems." American debate, by contrast, is pulled toward "Silicon Valley's millenarian fantasies about superintelligence" and "a belief in a winner-takes-all AI race rather than a long-running process of technological progress." China's archetypal AI thinker, he notes, is Kai-Fu Lee, "a technocrat with a polished public image."

The sci-fi lineage matters too. "Chinese stories have more often explored interactions between humanlike robots and ordinary people," while "American writing has fixated on technological singularity," a split he sees reflected in how each public frames adoption versus apocalypse.

On US politics, Palmer rejects the Silicon Valley line that opposition to data centers has a Beijing fingerprint. "As public opposition to artificial intelligence data centers rises across the United States, Silicon Valley elites and Republican politicians are accusing China of interference," he writes; in his telling, that opposition is domestic and genuine. He also flags Beijing's harder edge: when new rules take effect on Sept. 15, "foreigners can officially be prevented from leaving China for up to five years over technological security concerns," and exit bans have already been used on the founders of AI firm Manus.

Palmer expects asymmetric priorities at the September summit. "When Xi visits the United States for a September summit, the U.S. side will likely focus on maintaining AI superiority," he writes, while "the Chinese delegation will be more concerned with AI's effects on employment, military decision-making, and fraud."