The rapid spread of artificial intelligence has people wondering: who’s most likely to embrace AI in their daily lives? Many assume it’s the tech-savvy – those who understand how AI works – who are most eager to adopt it.
Surprisingly, our new research (published in the Journal of Marketing) finds the opposite. People with less knowledge about AI are actually more open to using the technology. We call this difference in adoption propensity the “lower literacy-higher receptivity” link.
Neither the position to keep all the old solutions because they are old nor to adopt all the new solutions because they are new is sensible.
Some old solutions worked in the past and don’t work anymore because the actual world around us changed (the bits outside our control, e.g. some resources might be more sparse but were more plentiful in the past, human populations are larger, the world is more interconnected,…).
Some old solutions appeared to work in the past because we didn’t have the knowledge about their flaws yet but now that we do we need new ones.
Some new solutions are genuine improvements, others are merely sold by marketing and hype.
Some new solutions have studies, data or even logic and math backing them up while others are adopted on a whim or even contrary to evidence or logic.
We can not escape the fact that the world is complex and requires evaluation on a case by case basis and simplistic positions like “keep everything old” or “replace everything old” do not work.