The global report Trust, attitudes and use of artificial intelligence (University of Melbourne and KPMG, 2025) revealed a notable difference between developed and emerging countries regarding use, trust and artificial intelligence (AI). While in places like Japan, Germany or France adoption is low, trust is limited and scarce training levels, in countries such as India, Egypt or Saudi Arabia the opposite occurs: intensive use, high benefit perception, strong confidence in technical capacities and greater disposition to adopt tools of AI, especially generative. The interesting thing is that these differences are not explained by access to technology or the educational level, since the report is based on 47 countries and more than 48,000 people surveyed, and controlled those variables. Nor are they a generational gap: in all countries young people are more open, but the gap is maintained between countries even within the same age stripes. The question is why. And the possible answer is not in technology, but in suffering.
All human activity is fleeing. There is no exception to this. From that premise, all economic activity is also determined exclusively by suffering. It is not rationality that guides our decisions, but to alleviate that suffering. Attitudes are reasonable, not rational: they respond to a pain or avoid it. AI, like any product or tool, responds to a demand, but that demand is not abstract or universal. It is always anchored in a need that, in more precise terms, is a suffering to solve. In emerging countries where the dominant suffering is material, AI appears as a concrete relief: it allows to learn faster, earn money without intermediaries, obtain medical diagnoses without shift, replace tedious tasks or reduce costs. In those contexts, there is no time or need to wonder if the use is ethical, if dehumanizes or if it replaces social links. The tool is useful because it relieves immediate pain. On the other hand, in advanced countries where suffering is no longer scarcity, but existential anxiety, professional vacuum or fear of symbolic replacement, AI does not bring relief, but suspicion. The tool does not respond to the type of dominant suffering and, therefore, is resisted.
This is not less. It means that artificial intelligences are not universal or neutral. There is no AI that serves everyone, but that relieve different sufferings, depending on the place that each society occupies in its own priorities pyramid. The division between China and the United States, which usually occurs as a technological competition, is not so much a matter of models architecture, but of what is the structure of sufferings that these are trying to address. India adopts the massively because it suffers from below, and the AI resolves. France doubts because it suffers from above, and the AI does not respond.
The report shows that trust does not arise from a communication strategy or a regulatory policy, but by the direct relationship between the tool and the dominant suffering. In marketing this is always understood: either the real pain of the other is detected to offer a relief, or a pain is created to be able to sell it later. But even to invent suffering, you have to know from what level the other part. Therefore, any analysis that ignores the nature of suffering is condemned to error. And any strategy that is right on that point, is successful above all.
Things as they are
Mookie Tenembaum addresses technology issues like this every week with Claudio Zuchovicki in his podcast artificial intelligence, financial perspectives, available in Spotify, Apple, YouTube and all platforms.
