AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

by Kai-Fu Lee

Self-driving cars make for a good example of this balancing act. In 2016, the United States lost forty thousand people to traffic accidents. That annual death toll is equivalent to the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurring once every month from January through November, and twice in December. The World Health Organization estimates that there are around 260,000 annual road fatalities in China and 1.25 million around the globe. Autonomous vehicles are on the path to eventually being far safer than human-driven vehicles, and widespread deployment of the technology will dramatically decrease these fatalities. It will also lead to huge increases in efficiency of transportation and logistics networks, gains that will echo throughout the entire economy. But alongside the lives saved and productivity gained, there will be other instances in which jobs or even lives are lost due to the very same technology. For starters, taxi, truck, bus, and delivery drivers will be largely out of luck in a self-driving world. There will also inevitably be malfunctions in autonomous vehicles that cause crashes. There will be circumstances that force an autonomous vehicle to make agonizing ethical decisions, like whether to veer right and have a 55 percent chance of killing two people or veer left and have a 100 percent chance of killing one person. Every one of these downside risks presents thorny ethical questions. How should we balance the livelihoods of millions of truck drivers against the billion...