Back to the 2026 Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) AI

Back to the 2026 Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) AI Index Report. There is a plot of public sentiment toward AI: are you expecting AI to eliminate jobs or to create new ones? The numbers varied from 27% pessimistic (job elimination) in Nigeria to 67% pessimistic in the US. So I wondered, what are possible predictors? Looking at unemployment, GDP per capita and trust in government as possible "explanatory" variables I ran a little statistical model and got a Leave-One-Out R2 of 0.5, with unemployment the biggest contributor, which makes sense. So not quite perfect, with 3 countries mispredicted by >10%, but worth exploring. The other piece that jumps out is the clustering: the "Western World" (with Poland an outlier) vs Asia vs others. By the way, it is not obvious from this graph but South Africa is a super-outlier on unemployment (32%).