Conditional Values: The Contingent Foundations of Attitudes toward Artificial Intelligence

How do broader values shape whether people judge artificial intelligence (AI) as good or bad for humanity? This article analyzes provisional World Values Survey Wave 8 data from 40,960 respondents in 24 country samples using pooled and national prediction models, outcome-independent respondent profiles, and groups of countries. The analysis reveals a cross-country anchor: general optimism about science and technology is the strongest pooled predictor of favorable AI evaluation and recurs among the leading predictors in every national sample. Expert authority, education and information access, selected forms of trust, openness, and demographic position provide nationally distinctive patterns. Eleven value profiles formed without AI attitudes span 49.1% to 62.2% favorable evaluation. Most evaluative variation occurs within these profiles, making them useful contexts for identifying how the same values distinguish favorable from unfavorable evaluators in different social configurations. Institutional legitimacy, structural advantage, information connectedness, personal choice, redistribution, and openness differentiate evaluations in particular profiles. The same axis can relate differently to AI evaluation across profiles: secular reasoning has a significant positive association among secular moderate pluralists but a suggestive negative association among institution-trusting civic joiners. Together, the findings show that public receptivity to AI as technological change has a common predictive anchor but develops within plural configurations of resources, institutions, authority, openness, and social position. This distinction helps anticipate where generalized technological optimism is likely to travel and where AI deployment and governance will encounter context-specific sources of legitimacy or concern.