The roots of AI fear in the West are cultural, not technological

In a year of increasingly wild rhetoric about AI in the US, perhaps the most memorable moment came last month, when President Donald Trump issued an executive order stating that the technology would no longer be known as “artificial”. Instead, it would be “super”. He followed up with a message to followers on his Truth Social platform, writing that his administration considers anyone who uses the term “artificial intelligence” rather than “super intelligence” as “THE ENEMY”. Though it might sound like the president is founding a state techno-religion, his wording reflects an idea that has been floating around Silicon Valley for years. The idea of “super intelligence” was popularised in the eponymous book by philosopher Nick Bostrom, who predicted that SI would evolve alongside a class of humans who are much smarter than their peers. These new (super) humans will rule over their inferiors, Bostrom suggested, while SI rules over everyone. Bostrom’s descriptions of an SI-dominated future bear more than a passing resemblance to medieval Christian doctrine, where an all-powerful God rules over a priestly class, which dispenses wisdom to the common people. And that’s no accident: it’s impossible to escape the ubiquity of biblical stories if you grow up in a Judeo-Christian context. When Westerners like me encounter something new and powerful, we often fall back on stories of an omniscient, singular God as a way to explain what’s happening to us. Advertisement Indeed, the debate between AI doomers vs AI accelerationists is very much like two Christian sects arguing over God’s intentions. The doomers take the Puritan angle, arguing that SI will destroy us in hellfire (or unemployment); the accelerationists take a gentler, Protestant approach, claiming that AI can improve our lives immeasurably, as long as we accept the loving Machine as our only saviour. We see this same debate playing out in science-fiction stories as well, where our future robot overlords sometimes destroy us, like the demonic Terminator and the bot from Ex Machina, or save our world like the cuddly, angelic mechs from WALL-E and The Wild Robot. As James Palmer argued in a recent Foreign Policy column, Western spiritual and sci-fi traditions leak over into public policy, shaping regulations as well as general perceptions of AI. He pointed out that this becomes obvious when you contrast the US approach to AI with the Chinese one. Chen Qiufan, author of the classic Chinese sci-fi novel Waste Tide and co-author of a collection of essays and stories about AI called AI 2041, agreed with Palmer. I reached out to Chen via email, and he explained that one of the biggest cultural differences between the two countries is that there is no single, great God in Chinese thought. There are local, neighbourhood gods, and “people negotiate with them”, he says, requesting wishes by offering something in return. “A god… is a powerful neighbour with a job description,” he said. “In the Chinese imagination a superintelligence tends to appear as an instrument, a bureaucracy, a servant or a family member.” According to Chen, AI is also viewed as a key part of a new industrial revolution in which China could take the lead. There is a widespread perception in China that the country was racing to catch up to the rest of the world during the 19th century industrial revolution. But now, AI represents an opportunity to assert national power through technological achievement. “The deepest fear is less about machines enslaving humanity and more about missing another industrial revolution,” said Chen. “Americans ask AI the theological question, who will save us or judge us. Chinese [people] ask it the historical question, will we be on time this round.” Robot uprisings and machine gods are rare in Chinese sci-fi. Right now, Chinese audiences are obsessed with “system novels” (系统文), in which a protagonist somehow gets an AI-like system installed in their brain. In these stories, the AI treats the human like an avatar in a game, telling them what to do, evaluating their progress and giving them points for succeeding in their quests. “It is half guardian spirit, half [key performance indicator] manager, and its whole purpose is to help an ordinary person level up and climb,” said Chen. This perfectly encapsulates the Chinese attitude to AI. It is not going to replace us; it is going to work with us, live inside us and inspire us to achieve more at our (human) jobs. It’s easy to see how the two AI story traditions play out when it comes to national policies. In the US, unregulated AI companies are encouraging businesses to replace humans with AI while fretting over the idea that “super intelligence” might magically come to life and smite us. In China, regulations are, as Palmer put it, aimed at “preventing AI from worsening youth unemployment” while beating the rest of the world to AI supremacy. There has to be a middle ground in our relationship with this technology. My hope is that our future machines exist somewhere between “super” and “artificial” intelligence, and possess neither godlike powers nor system-like control.