Japan Hasn't Lost Faith in AI. Here's the Sixty-Year Reason Why.

I analyzed three years of AI trust data gathered from the Stack Overflow Developer Survey and one country stood apart from the rest: Japan. Japanese developers have maintained positive trust in AI while trust decreases almost everywhere else. Their score points to a much deeper story.

Japan began building a relationship with robots a long time ago. Generations of Japanese children grew up with Astro Boy, a robot hero who could feel, fight, and be grieved. That raised a generation to see intelligent machines as companions rather than threats. Researchers at Indiana University Bloomington have documented how Japanese roboticists deliberately designed their technologies to fit these existing cultural expectations, embedding Shinto ideas about spirit in objects and craft traditions about honoring tools directly into how robots look, move, and are introduced to the public (Šabanović, 2014).

That cultural formation produced measurable outcomes. Japan today produces 38 percent of the world’s industrial robots, according to the International Federation of Robotics. Two of the four largest industrial robot manufacturers in the world are Japanese, and Japan holds the second largest industrial robot deployment in the world. To add another layer, Gelfand’s landmark study on cultural norms ranks Japan as one of the world’s tightest cultures (strong social norms + low tolerance for deviance), which means that when behaviors and attitudes take hold there, they take hold deeply and last.

For leaders thinking about AI adoption, this matters more than it might seem. The workforce arriving at your AI deployment did not form their views on intelligent machines during training. They formed them earlier on, through media experienced during youth and messaging about transformative technology being celebrated or feared. This was a formative time; a time researchers call “imprinting”, a time that also presents itself again during periods of great transition (Marquis & Tilscik, 2013). We are in that period.

Japan carried forth a story about robots as heroes for nearly sixty years. It’s now reaping what that story built, through robotics, absolutely, but perhaps still out of reach is something companies and organizations won’t admit they can’t master fast enough: trust.

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