How wealth shapes our view of artificial intelligence

There’s a common assumption that anxiety about artificial intelligence is universal — that everyone, everywhere, is bracing for the same disruption. But, a new Pew Research Centre Survey of over 42,000 adults across 37 countries, suggests otherwise.The survey’s data points out that worry about AI tracks closely with wealth. The richer the country, the more its people fear AI will take their jobs, widen inequality, and disrupt daily life. The poorer the country, the less its citizens fear AI as they simply haven’t formed an opinion on it yet.Per capita income, it turns out, may be the single best predictors of how a population feels about AI.The researchers split 36 core countries into 18 “high-income” and 18 “middle-income” nations, using World Bank’s classifications built on gross national income per capita. The gap between the two groups shows up in nearly every question that was part of the survey.A median of 55% of adults in high-income countries said AI will lead to fewer jobs in their country over the next decades. In middle-income countries, that figure drops nearly 20 points lower to 36%. People in poorer countries aren’t necessarily more hopeful; they’re more uncertain.Roughly a third of the adults in middle-income nations said they simply don’t know how AI will affect jobs, compared with about a fifth in wealthy ones.The same pattern holds for inequality. A median of 35% of adults in high-income countries believe AI will widen the gap between rich and poor, versus 22% in middle-income countries.In general, 40% of the respondents in the wealthy nations said they were more concerned than excited about AI’s growing presence in their daily lives, compared with 31% in middle-income nations.A clear divideWhen the researchers plotted individual countries against their GDP per capita, the correlation between GDP per capita and the belief that AI cost jobs was strong. On AI awareness — the share of people who said they’ve heard or read ‘a lot’ about AI — the connection was even stronger.Respondents in two Asian nations capture this divide. In Singapore, for instance, where GDP per capita is close to $100,000, 53% of its adults said they’ve heard or read ‘a lot’ about AI. In Bangladesh, where GDP per capita is about $2,600, just 4% of its adults reported the same level of awareness.Loss of jobs fear follows the same pattern as roughly seven in ten or more adults in Australia, South Korea and the US expect AI to shrink the job market over the next two decades. But in Kenya, Nigeria and the Philippines, that expectation is far less common as they are yet to form a strong view on the technology.Nearly half of Americans said the technology will widen the gap between rich and poor. In India, however, which is classified as a middle-income country, only 13% said the same.This divergence in attitudes of people in high-income and middle-income economies seems to be a function of the level of awareness of new technologies.People in advanced economies are far more likely to have encountered AI tools directly that have visibly threatened their job prospects.In middle-income nations, however, where informal labour and manual work still make up a large share of employment, AI’s impact can feel more abstract.Pew Research Centre found that in many middle-income countries, it’s the wealthier and more educated people within that country who are most likely to say AI will cost jobs or deepen inequality.Much of the gap traces back to the same driver: people with less income and less formal education are simply more likely to say they’re unsure of this technology. Uncertainty fills the space where worry would otherwise occupy.The bottomline is that familiarity with AI predicts concerns about AI, and that is a function of income.Beyond incomeApart from income, age plays a major role in how respondents perceive AI. Younger adults are dramatically more aware of AI than their elders. In Spain and Greece, the awareness gap between 18-to-34-year-olds and those 50 and older exceeds 50 percentage points.And in several wealthy nations, that awareness is translating into a distinctive kind of unease with a mix of concern, excitement and a rising tide of job-related anxiety among the young.In the US, share of adults under 35 who say they’re concerned about AI has jumped from 40% to 55% in the last 18-24 months. In Sweden, there is a starker shift as a year ago older Swedes are more worried about AI than younger ones. But now the two groups have converged with younger adults’ concern rising.This shows that young people in wealthy countries are the most digitally immersed, AI-literate, and most anxious lot — a combination that upends the idea that youth are optimistic about new technology.In India, just 13% of adults surveyed said they’ve heard or read ‘a lot’ about AI. This is one of the lowest figures in this survey, trailing far behind high-income countries.And the belief that AI will cost jobs is comparatively muted too. Among Indians 50 and older, just 20% expect fewer jobs over the next two decades, rising to 30% among those 35 to 49 and 33% among adults under 35 — a meaningful generational gap.That youngest-oldest pattern on jobs fits the broader global trend of younger adults being warier of AI’s economic disruption.But India breaks from the pack on general sentiment as it is one of the few countries in the survey where older adults (24%) are more likely than the youngest adults (15%) to say they’re primarily concerned rather than excited about AI in daily life — the opposite of what shows up almost everywhere else.The implication of this survey is double-edged for citizens and governments. Concern is often what drives demand for regulation and worker protections. That means the countries best positioned to frame laws around AI’s disruptions may be exactly the ones already feeling the most anxious about it.Meanwhile, in the middle-income economies, the absence of alarm may reflect not resilience, but simply not having been asked the question loudly enough yet.