By Majlinda Bregu/ When artificial intelligence becomes an anthropologist

2026-03-27 16:49:00, Opinione Majlinda Bregu

Artificial intelligence company Anthropic, inspired by 'anthropos', the Greek word for "human being", used artificial intelligence to ask 81,000 people what they use artificial intelligence for.

An AI interviewer.
Asking people.
About AI.
In 159 countries, in 70 languages.

It's all a bit confusing. For a moment, I'll leave the results aside and focus on the methodology.
Gallup has built an empire on polling. Ethnographers make their careers living inside different communities to understand their cultures and customs. Anthropology was born out of the belief that a society can only be understood by seeing itself through others.
And here comes the day when a machine has done something that no social scientist can do at this level.

The result is not just a statistic. It's something closer to a collective narrative. Tens of thousands of people talking about what they believe technology can do for the world. And perhaps because the interviewer was a machine, people turned out to have given more honest answers.
Anthropic's interviewer formulated four open-ended questions, listened to the responses, and adapted follow-up questions. Like a professional anthropologist. Then an AI subordinate :) analyzed, coded, and categorized the responses, and then produced the results.

What the study found, essentially, is that people are not clearly divided into optimists and pessimists about the AI ??boom in their lives.
They are divided by their needs, and those needs are shaped by where they live and what their societies have, or have failed to provide.
In wealthy, technologically advanced countries, people want AI to give them time to manage the complexity of life.

In developing and transition economies, people are looking for something completely different. They are looking for access to opportunity.

Southeastern Europe (with the Western Balkans within it) is at exactly this turning point. Not yet wealthy enough to ask AI for convenience, but largely asking it for something more urgent: a way out of difficult economic situations.
The Balkan Barometer 2025 Regional Cooperation Council - RCC has a figure worth stopping at: 29% of citizens in the Western Balkans now use AI, up from just 10% in 2024.
Almost a threefold increase. In one year.

The 29% of people using AI today are disproportionately young, educated, and digitally connected, precisely the population the region is losing to emigration to Western Europe.

For them, AI opens up two paths: to stay in their countries and use digital skills to work remotely, earning more without crossing the border, or to use the same skills to become more attractive to European labor markets and leave more quickly. Which path prevails will determine the trajectory of the region in the next decade.

In Western Europe , most people use AI for personal matters, lifestyle, and personal space.
Southeast Europe has the most “serious” users: entrepreneurship and financial independence rank significantly higher than the European average.

An employee in Copenhagen, for example, asks AI to clean up his email so he can think more clearly. His counterpart in Skopje or Tirana asks AI to help him build something from nothing, a business, or an idea for how to earn income that he doesn't have.
Both are asking AI to solve a problem. Although diametrically different.

Where the difference seems even greater are fears.

-In Western Europe, the top concern is privacy (17%), above the global average (13%), followed by governance gaps (18–19%). These are institutional fears: anxiety about who controls technology and how it could be used against citizens by governments or corporations.

-Southeastern Europe focuses more on insecurity and jobs.
Concern about work and the economy was the strongest indicator of negative attitudes towards AI in the entire study (34.1%), and precisely in regions like the Western Balkans, where unemployment is above 10% and 68% of young people are considering leaving, this fear is strongest.

However, one concern we share with the world is the loss of the ability to think.
Whether you are a lawyer in Vienna or a student in Sarajevo, the fear that you are delegating your thinking to a machine and gradually losing the ability to think for yourself crosses all borders, income levels, and languages. It is perhaps the most human fear of all.

Students are 2.5 to 3 times more likely than average to be affected by this phenomenon. That critical thinking and schooling are in crisis, there is no longer any doubt.
Most likely, we can all agree: the benefits of digital technology and its harm are sister and brother.

Western Europe is dealing with the legal regulation of AI, the European AI Act and obligations for users.
We are pinning our hopes on AI to give us jobs.
AI is studying humans, while humans are still trying to understand themselves.

The question is whether the technology that is giving people new reasons for hope is also shaping the decision-making about their destinies.
AI enhances the capacity of the individual. Governance determines the quality of the system.
But this is not a problem that AI can solve for us.