People in Germany and other European countries are considerably less optimistic about digitisation and future technologies than their peers for instance in Asia, a new study has found.
Only 48.2 per cent of respondents in Germany rated the potentials of digitisation as positive or very positive, compared to 54.7 percent in the United States, the Vodafone Institute for Society and Communications said on Wednesday. In China, 83.3 per cent saw the consequences of digitisation as positive, while 89.4 per cent did so in India.
The background for the study was the growing discrepancy between Europe and Asia: in the emerging countries, technological developments are progressing much faster than in the leading industrial nations.
The fundamental changes created by digitisation are "accompanied by fears of automation or job loss" in Europe, said Christoph Igel of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. This basic fear does not exist in large parts of Asia.
"Our study shows that many Europeans see the supposedly secure status quo threatened," said Vodafone Institute managing director Inger Paus. "The Western industrial nations have apparently lost their belief in progress."
It is the job of politicians and businesses to "demonstrate that digitisation has the potential to improve society in the long term," Paus said.
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