Opinion | China is worried about artificial intelligence, too

If you were to try to distill the mood in China, the public mood around AI, how would you describe it and how is it different from the United States? I think the biggest concern in China now is the worry about falling behind in technology. So I think there’s a lot of concerns in the United States about job displacement, and AI being a net negative force in society. In China, there are some of these concerns, and I can go back to that. But I think the fear among individuals, companies and workers now is that they are not keeping up with AI, that they are not using it enough and are not familiar enough with this new technology that they are not competitive enough in the job market. Interestingly, this concern at the individual level reflects China’s concern at the national level. When ChatGPT first appeared, there was a lot of concern in China among China’s AI industry and among policymakers in Beijing, concerned that China was also falling behind, and that they were not making the most of this transformative new technology. So it’s interesting to see this kind of reversal where it’s not about how do I keep this technology out of my life; It’s about how do I bring it further and integrate it and give myself that edge in a very crowded market. But this is the technology trend in Silicon Valley and adjacent to technology. that it. It’s spreading, but you’re seeing it in a very limited area of ​​the American economy. But are you saying that it’s more prevalent in China, that you don’t have to work for DeepSeek or work for Alibaba or something like that to have the mindset of “Am I falling behind? I should add AI protocols”? This is correct. So it’s interesting that AI is hitting at a time when China is already experiencing a whole host of concerns about labor markets, especially for young college graduates. So, for example, China’s youth unemployment rate is basically double that of the United States. It’s close to 17 percent, which is very high. The number of new university graduates entering the labor market this year alone is more than 12 million in China. These are all people competing for many of the same jobs. They don’t want to work in factories. They don’t want to have blue collar jobs or delivery jobs. In their minds, they want good jobs. They worry that if they don’t keep up with AI, they might not get it. So, it’s a long-term concern about this highly competitive environment in China.