Opinion | China is also concerned about AI

If you were to try to distill the mood in China, the national mood around AI, how would you describe it? And how is it different from the United States? I think the biggest fear in China right now is the fear of falling behind in technology. So I think there’s a lot of concern in the United States about job loss and about AI being a net negative factor in society. There are some of those concerns in China as well, but I’d like to come back to that. But I think the fear right now among individuals, businesses, and workers is that they’re not keeping up with advances in AI, they’re not taking full advantage of it, they’re not familiar enough with this new technology to be fully competitive in the labor market. And interestingly, this anxiety at the individual level seems to mirror China’s anxiety at the national level. When ChatGPT first debuted, there was a lot of trepidation among China’s AI industry and policymakers in Beijing, who feared that China was also falling behind and not being able to take full advantage of this new, innovative technology. So it’s interesting to see this kind of mirroring, and it’s not a question of how to eliminate this technology from your life. It’s about how we can take that further, integrate it and gain an advantage in a very crowded market. But that’s exactly the tech-adjacent attitude of Silicon Valley. that’s right. Although it is spreading, it is found in a fairly limited area of ​​the American economy. But it’s just much more prevalent in China, and are you saying you don’t have to work at DeepSeek or work at Alibaba or whatever to have the mindset of, “Am I falling behind? I have to add an AI protocol”? That’s true. It is therefore interesting that AI is emerging at a time when China was already experiencing a great deal of insecurity in the labor market, especially for young university graduates. For example, China’s youth unemployment rate is essentially twice that of the United States. This is close to 17 percent, which is a very high number. More than 12 million new graduates will enter the job market in China this year alone. These are all people competing for many of the same jobs. They don’t want to work in factories. They don’t want blue collar jobs or delivery jobs. They want a good job in their hearts. And they worry that if they don’t keep up with advances in AI, they won’t be able to get them. Therefore, there will be long-term concerns about this highly competitive environment in China.