December 22, 2025
The Western AI Discourse Is Strangely Self-Centered
The global conversation around artificial intelligence has a curious quality: it presents itself as universal while remaining deeply provincial. We speak about AI as if “we” were all of humanity, when in reality most of the anxiety, moral hesitation, and cultural resistance comes from a very specific slice of the world: educated, middle- to upper-middle-class Western societies, and within those, disproportionately European ones. This is less a moral accusation than a structural (self-)observation.
While AI adoption is accelerating worldwide, the tone of the discourse differs dramatically depending on where one looks. In many parts of the Global South, AI is approached pragmatically: as a tool, a multiplier, a way to compress time, bypass bottlenecks, and gain leverage in environments where institutional support is weak or unreliable. In much of the West, by contrast, AI is framed as a threat to authenticity, creativity, dignity, individuality, and meaning itself. The result is a conversation that talks past reality.
Why the AI Debate Feels Universal (But Isn’t)
If you spend time on Western platforms — LinkedIn, YouTube, academic circles, creative communities — you encounter a dominant narrative: AI produces “slop,” lacks soul, flattens originality, averages human expression, and erodes what makes us human. These critiques appear so frequently that they begin to feel like a global consensus. However, they are not. They are amplified because the people most likely to comment, publish, critique, and moralize are also the people least dependent on immediate utility. In other words, those who can afford to hesitate before adopting AI are the ones who set the current tone.
Meanwhile, adoption data tells a different story. Usage growth is fastest in developing and emerging economies. Students, freelancers, entrepreneurs, and small operators use AI not to debate it, but to work. Language barriers dissolve. Expertise compresses. Output equalizes. For many, AI is not an existential threat but a rare opportunity to compete on more equal footing in a global system that historically excluded them. The apparent universality of Western skepticism is therefore a visibility illusion, not a demographic one.
Utility vs. Identity
Much of the Western debate collapses several distinct concerns into one emotional response. Untangling them matters. There are at least four different dimensions at play:
Utility
Does AI help people do things faster, better, cheaper, or at all?
Ethics and governance
Who controls the systems? What values are encoded? What should be regulated?
Environmental cost
Energy use, water consumption, infrastructure strain.
Identity and authorship
What happens to originality, creativity, individuality, and the idea of the “human spark”?
Globally, the first dimension dominates. In much of the West, the other three, but especially the fourth. This asymmetry explains much of the tension. Cultures that have not historically fetishized individual authorship or originality experience far less existential discomfort when tools blur those boundaries. Where survival, stability, and opportunity matter more than symbolic purity, AI is evaluated instrumentally. In Europe especially, the anxiety runs deeper. The fear is not merely economic, but philosophical.
A European Inheritance: Depth, Soul, and the Cult of Originality
European culture carries a particular historical burden. From Plato through Christianity, through the Enlightenment and Romanticism, Europe developed an unusually intense relationship to interiority, authorship, and the idea that meaning arises from individual depth. The modern Western self is not just a worker or citizen, but a moral and creative subject. Originality is not optional; it is a cultural imperative. To be “average” is not merely being unremarkable — it is almost unethical. AI strikes directly at this inheritance.
Large language models expose something uncomfortable: much of what we consider “deep,” “original,” or “authentic” is statistically patterned, culturally inherited, and socially reinforced. The shock is not that AI produces average output, but that much of human output was already closer to average than we liked to admit. This is why the critique often takes a moral tone. It is not only about quality, but about identity. AI threatens Western exceptionalism at the level of self-image.
The Limits of the Space Race Analogy
AI is frequently framed as a new “space race.” The metaphor is seductive but misleading. The space race was symbolic. It demonstrated technological superiority, but its direct impact on everyday life was minimal. Whether the US or the Soviet Union reached the moon first did not meaningfully change the lived reality of the average citizen. AI is the opposite.
Even a system that is “second best” by benchmark standards transforms daily life. A model that is 80 percent as capable still rewires labor markets, education, creativity, and cognition. Adoption matters more than victory. Spread matters more than primacy.
This is why the race metaphor fails. There is no finish line after which others stop. China will not abandon AI development because a Western lab reaches AGI first. Nor will emerging economies pause adoption out of ideological deference. The technology propagates because human cognition and economic incentives are universal. Physics made rockets converge. The structure of the human mind makes AI converge.
Economic Geography in an AI World
AI collapses a long-standing Western advantage: temporal distance. Historically, innovations emerged in the West and diffused outward slowly. Geography, institutions, language, and capital created decades-long lags. That lag was a form of protectionism. AI removes it. When tools are globally accessible, output quality converges faster than wages do.
A designer, analyst, or animator in a lower-cost country can produce comparable results at a fraction of the price. This is already happening. The consequence is not that “the West is doomed,” but that value increasingly decouples from location. Competitive advantage shifts from credentials and proximity to speed, adaptability, and integration. Western discomfort with this shift is understandable. But discomfort is not a long-term strategy.
Geopolitics Without People
Adding to this, in the Western AI discourse other regions appear constantly — yet rarely as societies undergoing transformation. They are framed instrumentally, not culturally. China is treated primarily as an ideological opponent. Its AI systems matter insofar as they threaten Western technological leadership, challenge narratives around ethics and censorship, or force acceleration. The dominant question is whether “we” are ahead, freer, or more aligned with liberal values. What is largely ignored is how AI is reshaping Chinese labor markets, education, or everyday cognition. China becomes a benchmark and a provocation, not a parallel human experiment.
The Middle East is framed differently, but no less reductively. It appears as capital, infrastructure, and geography. A place to build server farms, deploy energy-intensive computation, and attract large-scale investment. Its relevance lies in funding capacity and strategic positioning, not in cultural adoption or social impact. The region is discussed as substrate rather than subject.
In both cases, the underlying transformation disappears. AI adoption is treated as a geopolitical contest rather than a shared planetary shift everyone lives through. Western discourse asks what China and the Middle East do for us: China as competitive pressure, the Middle East as financial and infrastructural leverage. What is missing is recognition that the same tools are being adopted across radically different contexts, often producing similar effects on productivity, cognition, and coordination. Yet the debate remains self-referential. AI becomes another surface onto which Western anxieties about power, ethics, and identity are projected.
Why Western Self-Handicapping Matters
The West’s hesitation is not only ethical or environmental. It is also ideological. Western cultures place extraordinary value on autonomy, originality, and the sovereign individual mind. AI is perceived as corrosive to all three. This leads to a form of self-handicapping: moral overinvestment in restraint while others optimize for use.
This does not mean ethics are irrelevant. It means ethics cannot substitute for engagement. Tools improve through use and models align through data. Abstention does not preserve values; it forfeits influence. Ironically, if one believes that Western norms around transparency, pluralism, and speech matter, intense usage of western AI systems is a more effective strategy than moral withdrawal.
A Final Clarification…
None of this implies that AI is neutral, benevolent, or inevitable in its current form. It does imply that the central Western framing — “AI vs. humanity” — obscures more than it reveals.
AI is less a moral problem than a coordination problem, a distribution problem, and an identity shock. Treating it as a referendum on soul and originality may be emotionally satisfying, but it leaves the real dynamics untouched. The world is not waiting for philosophical closure before moving on. Thus the more useful question is not whether AI threatens what we were, but whether we can articulate what matters after the tools arrive — without pretending we can uninvent them and “just go back”.
… and a Final Irony
There is one last irony that complicates the entire Western anxiety around AI. If any societies had a legitimate reason to fear artificial intelligence as a threat to cultural identity, it would not be the West - it would be everyone else. Contemporary AI systems are deeply shaped by Western epistemology and values. They are trained predominantly on Western languages, Western academic norms, Western media, Western legal reasoning, Western liberal assumptions about agency, speech, and rationality. Even the much-discussed “neutrality” of AI reflects a specifically Western ideal: secular, procedural, individual-centered, and abstracted from tradition.
In this sense, AI is not an alien invasion launched against the West (although the US secretly wishes for that, let’s be honest). It is, to a large extent, a mirror the West built for itself. And yet, it is Western societies that express the most existential anxiety about its effects. The fear is not primarily that AI will erase Western culture in favor of something foreign, but more that it exposes something uncomfortable about Western culture itself.
AI reproduces Western reasoning without the romance of authorship. It mirrors Western creativity without the myth of genius. It reflects Western rationality without the moral drama of individual struggle. In doing so, it destabilizes a deep-seated Western belief: that meaning arises from singular interior depth rather than from pattern, accumulation, and inheritance.
This is why the reaction feels paradoxical. The West birthed a technology aligned with its own worldview, only to recoil when that worldview is rendered explicit, scalable, and impersonal. What feels like cultural destruction is, in part, cultural self-recognition. Ultimately, AI forces a confrontation between two Western inheritances that have long coexisted uneasily: the drive for universal systems and the worship of individual exception.
If anything, this dynamic is evidence that the West is encountering its own abstractions at scale — and discovering that it does not entirely like what they are when stripped of narrative, scarcity, and mystique. In that sense, AI may simply be the light at the cave’s exit — and the revealing thing is how many of us insist that the shadows were more authentic than the forms.