Between 1405 and 1433, the Chinese admiral Zheng He led seven enormous naval expeditions across the Indian Ocean. His fleets visited Southeast Asia, India, Arabia and East Africa, establishing diplomatic relations, exchanging goods and demonstrating the power of the Ming empire. China was one of the wealthiest and most technologically sophisticated civilisations on Earth, and its capacity to organise these expeditions was extraordinary. And then the voyages stopped.
It wasn’t because the Chinese had forgotten how to build ships, or because sailing had suddenly become impossible. The imperial court had other priorities. The expeditions were expensive, their political value was disputed and powerful officials opposed them. After 1433, the Ming emperors never again sponsored anything comparable. China didn’t entirely abandon maritime trade, as the popular version of this story sometimes suggests, but the state withdrew from the sort of ambitious maritime activity that Zheng He’s expeditions had represented.
Meanwhile, Europeans were beginning to venture further into the Atlantic. In 1498, Vasco da Gama reached India by sailing around Africa. Over the following centuries, European maritime expansion transformed the world. By the nineteenth century, the balance of power had changed dramatically. Britain defeated China in the First Opium War, and the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 forced China to open treaty ports and cede Hong Kong. Further defeats and unequal treaties followed.
Of course, cancelling Zheng He’s expeditions didn’t directly cause the Opium Wars four centuries later. The Industrial Revolution, military developments and the internal problems of the Qing empire all played enormous roles. Nevertheless, I think there’s an important lesson here. A civilisation can possess considerable technological capabilities, decide that pursuing certain opportunities is no longer worthwhile and eventually discover that other civilisations have used the intervening centuries to become much more powerful.
I’ve been wondering whether the wealthy Western world is at risk of making a similar mistake, not necessarily by abandoning any particular technology, but by developing a general suspicion of technological change.
An article in The Economist in October 2026, entitled ‘The surprising popularity of AI’, highlighted a remarkable difference in attitudes around the world. While much of the debate in Europe and North America concerns the dangers of artificial intelligence, people in many poorer countries are considerably more optimistic. In a survey covering 34 countries, nearly nine out of ten respondents in Nigeria and Vietnam expected AI to improve both their own lives and humanity’s future. In America, Canada and France, by contrast, more respondents expected a negative than a positive impact on humanity.
The online survey has limitations, and optimism doesn’t necessarily translate into successful adoption. Nevertheless, the pattern is striking. The Economist suggests several explanations. Workers in poorer countries often have less secure employment and fewer established privileges to protect. Where education, healthcare and professional expertise are difficult to access, AI might offer capabilities that were previously unavailable. A shopkeeper in Mumbai can use it to produce advertisements that would once have required hiring a designer, while someone without access to a good teacher might suddenly have an inexpensive personal tutor.
There’s another interesting observation. In countries such as South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, many people have personally experienced the transformation of relatively poor societies into wealthy ones through industrialisation and technological development. They know from experience that radical change can improve living standards enormously. In much of Western Europe, however, younger generations have grown up with relatively stagnant living standards, expensive housing and a sense that the future may be less prosperous than the past.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that the former tend to see technological change as an opportunity while the latter increasingly regard it as a threat. I think there’s a danger that this difference in outlook could become self-reinforcing. A society that expects technological progress to improve people’s lives is more likely to experiment, invest and tolerate failures. A society that expects change to make things worse may concentrate on preventing disruption, protecting existing professions and preserving familiar institutions.
Artificial intelligence is a particularly interesting example because it challenges our assumptions about human intellectual labour. In Denmark, for instance, the publisher Lindhardt og Ringhof recently introduced sweeping restrictions on the use of external AI tools by people working on its behalf. Copyright and confidentiality are reasonable concerns, but I can’t help wondering whether such restrictions go further than necessary, particularly when there are ways of using AI that don’t involve disclosing protected material. There’s also something troubling about the apparent pride with which some organisations announce these policies, as though refusing to use a potentially valuable technology were itself a professional virtue.
Imagine a pharmaceutical company proudly announcing that it doesn’t use computers for drug discovery because medicines ought to be developed by human scientists. We’d probably regard that as a rather alarming admission. Yet similar arguments sometimes seem respectable when applied to writing, translation or education. I suspect we’re confusing the value of an achievement with the difficulty of producing it. If a researcher can accomplish in one month what previously required ten years, that doesn’t make the research less valuable. It means the researcher has gained nine years and eleven months in which to accomplish something else.
The implications extend well beyond individual productivity. Consider a hypothetical diplomatic negotiation in 2030. The Chinese delegation arrives having used advanced AI systems to analyse the negotiating history of every participant, examine their domestic political constraints, identify possible compromises and explore thousands of potential strategies. The European and American delegations have prepared in the traditional manner, relying on experienced diplomats and specialists, but institutional concerns about AI have largely prevented them from incorporating comparable systems.
Everyone around the table is intelligent, experienced and well informed. But one side has access to an additional analytical capability that the others have chosen not to use. Perhaps the Chinese negotiators can anticipate objections more accurately, identify weaknesses in the other side’s position or discover compromises that quietly advance China’s longer-term interests. Nothing dramatic happens. The Chinese delegation simply seems extraordinarily well prepared and consistently secures slightly more favourable outcomes.
Now imagine that happening thousands of times, in trade negotiations, international organisations and diplomatic discussions across the world. The cumulative effects could be enormous, even if nobody identifies the technological difference as the underlying cause.
Of course, this is a thought experiment rather than a prediction. Western governments are already exploring AI applications, and there’s no guarantee that AI-assisted diplomacy will produce better decisions. A system that confidently misunderstands another government’s intentions could be positively dangerous. But if increasingly capable technology eventually provides a substantial analytical advantage, countries that learn to use it effectively may gain an advantage over those that don’t.
The same principle applies to scientific research, industrial development, education and healthcare. The danger isn’t necessarily that one part of the world develops technology that the rest cannot obtain. It’s that some societies become exceptionally good at using new capabilities while others remain reluctant to experiment. Initially, the differences might be small, but they could accumulate. Those who use new technologies extensively would also become better at identifying applications that hadn’t occurred to anyone before.
There are good reasons to be cautious. Technological progress has often brought enormous benefits alongside serious social and environmental costs, and AI raises legitimate concerns about employment, privacy and concentration of power. China’s enthusiasm for AI also raises questions about surveillance and authoritarian control. We shouldn’t assume that every innovation is desirable simply because it’s possible. But I think we need to distinguish between managing technological change and attempting to avoid it. The former is necessary if we want progress to improve people’s lives. The latter may eventually leave us unable to influence how technology develops, because the important decisions will increasingly be made elsewhere.
This is where the Zheng He analogy becomes uncomfortable. China in the fifteenth century wasn’t a poor or technologically backward country desperately trying to catch up with Europe. It was a wealthy, sophisticated empire that could afford to regard ambitious overseas expeditions as unnecessary. Four centuries later, European powers possessed advantages that allowed them to dictate terms to China. The Chinese couldn’t simply opt out of the consequences of European technological and military development.
Our situation is obviously different, and there’s no reason to assume that Western scepticism towards emerging technologies will produce a comparable catastrophe. But I do wonder whether we’re beginning to display some of the complacency that can arise when a society has become accustomed to being wealthy, technologically advanced and politically influential.
We can decide which technologies we want to develop, how we want to regulate them and how much disruption we’re prepared to tolerate. What we cannot decide is whether the rest of the world will make the same choices.
The Ming emperors could decide that China no longer needed Zheng He’s ships. They couldn’t decide that the rest of the world would stop sailing.