The View From Elsewhere

What the global conversation about AI looks like when we stop assuming everyone shares the same values and fears

I am from the US, and I live in Europe, so I grew up in a very Western context.

Having been educated in a Western context, I have studied the world through this lens, and while I have tried to remedy the gap of perspective through studying philosophies and histories that I was not formally taught, I cannot say I have done the best job at looking at the innovations happening around the globe. This includes innovations with AI, an industry moving so fast it feels hard to keep up with.

Frankly I only have surface-level knowledge about the innovations in non-US/EU cultures and how the regulations are implemented. I am seeking to remedy this, and to look beyond the lens I was raised in, and beyond the noise I am enveloped in currently, and to see what is being done around the entire world.

There is a brilliant article by Hybrid Horizons that inspired me to truly dive into this. They raised a point I want to echo:

We “assume a world that already has the things AI threatens to erode. Cognitive sovereignty assumes you had sovereignty to begin with: access to education, to information, to institutions that could be trusted to know things on your behalf. Beautiful inefficiencies assume the inefficient practices existed and did their formative work. Cognitive credit card debt assumes you possessed the cognitive infrastructure to mortgage.”

We often compare AI to something that already exists, such as AI vs doctors. But in some places in the world, AI has no competition, and brings a new meaning to the word accessibility. It is not just making it easier to gain access to something, it is making it possible.

However, when we talk about how we build and develop AI-based tools and products, we often look through a Western lens of individualism, concerned with data privacy and individual efficiency. We do not look through the eyes of the people using it.

Throughout history, one of the primary mediums we have used to develop and engage with culture is story. Now, there is a lot of nuance within the conversations about AI, but stories can show where we focus our discussions on. They reflect the values we hold.

These values translate into how we work and how we build. AI is not just viewed differently around the globe, but people are building different tools with it, and the models being trained are reflecting these values.

So today I want to go through a few stories that might make a little clearer how it is being used differently in different areas of the world. Again, there is much more nuance than I will show here, and I am not saying there is a way that is fully right or wrong, but listening to different voices is not just important, it is vital.

To start, what is the narrative we often hear?

What happens if we lose control?

In Western cultures, we tend to be more individualistic, and we treat AI as something we must control tightly. If the creator loses control, the creation becomes a threat.

We see this played out in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.

Victor Frankenstein, wanting to find what causes life, creates a new being from scavenged parts in secret. But as soon as the Creature opens its eyes, he runs and abandons it. The Creature goes, learns on its own, and makes a discovery - it is intelligent, but socially it is not accepted. It is considered a monster, and a threat.

The Creature finds Victor and asks for a mate so he will not be alone anymore. Victor starts to comply, but destroys the female creature partway through because he views the threat of a new “race of devils” to great to control. The novel ends with a lot of death and regret. The Creature murders the people closest to Victor, and Victor dies wishing he could have destroyed his creation.

I am not saying this is what will happen, but this is the fear we do see spreading.

Frankenstein created a being that had a blank slate, and perhaps because it was treated as such a threat, it became one. Perhaps the tragedy for Frankenstein was not that the creature existed, but that he refused to take responsibility for it.

I do want to clarify, the EU and the US approach AI very differently, and the timing of regulation being implemented is probably the clearest distinction we can see. The US is much more market-led, while the EU has implemented one of the most comprehensive regulatory legal documents in the AI Act.

Autonomy and data privacy are the driving concerns in individualistic societies, and the development of LLMs has been a size contest - who has the biggest and most powerful model? But the impact on the community might be neglected. What happens to a community when AI is treated as an integral part?

Could a creation become a companion?

Astro Boy is a manga first published in 1952, set in a futuristic world where humans and robots coexist. Astro is a powerful android, created by a scientist who wanted to replace his son who had been killed. However, since he could not be human and grow up, the scientist rejects him and sells him to a robot circus, where Astro experiences a systemic cruelty of humans towards robots.

However, this is not the same tragic ending as Frankenstein. The head of the Ministry of Science finds and rescues him, gives him a robot family, and tells him to be a good robot (not a human). Astro is actually quite powerful, and he becomes a defender of Earth, fighting against prejudice that stems from fear between humans and robots.

There are a number of adaptations of this into anime, films, and video games, but in general, he never has to prove his humanity or that he deserves respect, he simply has to be a part of a community.

Throughout the series, there is a tendency towards prejudice still, but the robots are still given rights. They are not treated as human, but they are still integrated into society.

Japan is a global leader in humanoid robotics, as seen through the government’s Moonshot Program that sees a society with robots fully integrated by 2050. I have seen a number of robots with AI being developed by Japanese companies that are made for elderly care and companionship, and many roboticists were inspired by stories such as Astro Boy [1].

In a public opinion poll by Stanford in 2025, researchers found that AI has affected peoples’ daily lives the most of any of the surveyed countries, and they are more informed about which products to use, but they are not the most informed of what it actually is [2]. They expect future impact to be lower than other countries, but that is likely because they have already felt a strong impact, though primarily this is within workers.

Interestingly, Japan also has some of the lowest adoption rates by the general population. Of the companies surveyed in the same Stanford poll, they ranked as the least nervous country regarding AI, but also trusted companies to protect their data the least.

Who owns knowledge?

Shifting from East Asia to West Africa, the AI ecosystem is doing something distinct. Products are primarily about redistribution and access, while in the US and Europe we often think about AI replacing something, whether it is people or systems.

Shamba Records provides three things to the farming community that they did not have access to - agricultural credit scoring to access microloans, climate-risk navigation to optimize their crop health, and traceability of their supply chain to allow them to sell carbon credits [3].

Anansi the Spider comes from West African traditions, and has many different variations and stories within. He is a character in Akan religion and folklore, and is in a way an intermediary between the world of humans and gods. He is a clever character, using his intelligence, not power, to meet his goals.

One such story is how he brought stories to humanity [4].

One day he saw how sad humans were, and how disconnected. He went and visited the Sky God, and saw he had many stories just laying around. He thought it would make people happy to have stories, so he asked the Sky God if he could share them. The Sky God only would if he completed four extremely difficult tasks. Anansi was able to complete them, and begrudgingly, the Sky God permitted him to share stories with humanity.

Anansi never owned the stories, he just distributed them.

There is another story about Anansi and a pot of wisdom, where he tries to hide a clay pot filled with all the wisdom in the world. He wanted to hide it in a tree so he could keep it all to himself, and he struggled to get it up there until his son suggested he tie it to his back. This made it quite easy, but he became angry since he was the one who was supposed to be wise. In his anger, he threw the pot down and it broke, allowing wisdom to be spread throughout the world.

Some falls in one place, and some in another, and no one owns it all.

We asked who owns knowledge, but is knowledge something to be owned?

There is a danger if one person or organization claims it. African startups have only gotten just over $800 million in funding over the last five years [5]. Instead of trying to compete with tech giants in the US or EU and build LLMs from scratch, they modify them to fit the needs in their communities.

Over 7,000 languages are spoken globally, yet LLMs are only trained on ~100 [6]. In Africa, over 2,000 languages are spoken with only 42 being supported by major LLMs, and among those only four are consistently functional for real use. This is a gap of 98% of the languages in Africa.

The startups I mentioned are building to allow people to be able to use AI models in their language by changing tokenization methods. The products are not optimized for engagement metrics, they are built for communal benefits. They are educational access tools, financial literacy and inclusion, agricultural optimization.

That being said, this still depends on foreign foundational models built by companies such as Google, Anthropic, or OpenAI. Immediate utility is what serves people, but does defer investment in research. This is not necessarily a problem, just a tradeoff.

There is no single organization that can concentrate the power, no single country that can serve everyone, no single framework that will work even across everyone. Every culture has different values, every country has different legal structures.

Maybe instead of trying to impose one way to view AI, one way to regulate it, one way to value it, we include other voices as well.

There are many voices

There are many other cultures and views that I cannot fully dive into in this short an article, but I do want to acknowledge there are many more voices we can listen to. I will link to more in depth articles and frameworks for these, but to briefly mention three more:

India’s Seven Sutras governance framework is reflected directly from the Mahabharata, the Hindu smriti text [7]. The Brahmastra is the most powerful celestial weapon, and could destroy the world and was constrained by moral obligation. Immensely powerful tools require ethical governance, where the danger is not the tool’s autonomy but the wielder’s moral fitness.

Australia Aboriginal peoples hold a process known as The Dreaming, which defines the creation of the world not as a single past event, but an ongoing continuous process. The Dreaming cannot be reduced to a story the way Frankenstein can, but this irreducibility is itself the point. It is impossible to have knowledge without context, and we should not measure impact of AI only on people, but the entire world [8].

In Chinese mythology, there is a goddess, Nüwa, who created humans from clay and later repaired a broken sky to save humanity from catastrophe [9]. She is a creator and a repairer. Nüwa inherited the catastrophe of a broken sky, even though she did not create it. She did not simply fix the sky, but maintained it over time. China’s governance models reflect this, as the state does not create AI and let the market run. It creates infrastructure and then actively manages, intervenes, and repairs it.

There is no one-size-fits-all

I am not trying to claim one culture inherently has better values than another. The point here is that the values a culture and society holds will influence everything, including entire industries. We talk about AI as simultaneously a mirror and a megaphone, revealing and amplifying voices, and that includes the values behind them.

We treat voices as having the same assumptions and values behind them, but once we listen to peoples’ stories, it becomes clear that we have not been listening.

The global conversation has been centered around the fear of losing control. However, this is not who primarily is benefiting from or even using AI. The US plus the EU collectively represent approximately 25–30% of global AI users [10]. That means 70–75% of the world’s AI users are outside the US and EU, but 70–80% of the revenue comes from the US and EU.

The majority of users have the least influence over how the tools they depend on are designed.

References

1. Lintvedt, Naomi, Do the Manga Robots Astro Boy and Doraemon Shape the Law of Robotics?, The Digital Constitutionalist, 2025, https://digi-con.org/do-the-manga-robots-astro-boy-and-doraemon-shape-the-law-of-robotics/

2. Maslej, Nestor et al., AI Index Report 2025: Public Opinion, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, 2025, https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report/public-opinion

3. Anansi and the Sky God’s Stories, Creative English Teacher, https://creativeenglishteacher.com/pages/anansi-and-the-sky-gods-stories

4. The $803M Question — Can Africa Build AI or Just Use It, StartupList Africa, 2025, https://blog.startuplist.africa/articles/ai-revolution-in-africa-2025

5. Why Generative AI Needs to Be Trained on More Languages, World Economic Forum, 2025, https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/10/generative-ai-languages-llm/

6. Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, India AI Governance Guidelines: Enabling Safe and Trusted AI Innovation, Government of India, 2025, https://static.pib.gov.in/WriteReadData/specificdocs/documents/2025/nov/doc2025115685601.pdf

7. How Indigenous Communities Are Using Technology to Preserve Languages and Culture, Microsoft, https://news.microsoft.com/life/indigenous-cultures/

8. Nuwa, Mythopedia, 2022, https://mythopedia.com/topics/nuwa/

9. Kemp, Simon, More Than 1 Billion People Use AI, DataReportal, 2025, https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2026-one-billion-people-using-ai