What the Last Revolution Taught You

The numbers come from Ipsos survey data in Stanford's 2025 AI Index. 83% of Chinese respondents believe AI's benefits outweigh its drawbacks. So do 80% in Indonesia and 77% in Thailand. In the United States the figure is 39%, with Canada at 40% and the Netherlands at 36%. Grace Shao's argument in Bloomberg is that this is not really a poll about artificial intelligence. It is a poll about what the previous technology wave did to you. Americans watched the social media era curdle, and they are pricing that experience into the next thing. Chinese consumers watched mobile technology visibly upgrade daily life, and they are pricing that in instead.

For caregiving, this is the whole ballgame, because care technology in America launches into that 39%. When a family hesitates over a camera, a sensor, or an AI care tool, the resistance usually is not about the product in front of them. It is about the last decade of products behind them. Trust arrives through experience and through people, not through capability claims, which is the same conclusion the adoption research keeps reaching one study at a time.

Yesterday we published a 28-country study showing robot acceptance rises where human care is scarce. Put these side by side and a map emerges. Willingness to accept help from a machine is set by what your society did to you last time, and by who is left to help you this time. Neither has much to do with the machine. The countries aging fastest are, mostly, the countries that still trust the technology. The country building the most of it is the one that doesn't.