What I'm Hearing in China This Week About Our Shared Future

New York Times

25-03-2025

There is a lot of talk in Beijing this week over when President Trump and President Xi Jinping of China will meet face to face. Some Chinese experts say the two leaders need to wait a few months until Trump decides exactly what tariffs he is going to impose on China — and what China will do in response.
Can I just butt in and say: 'Excuse me, Mr. Presidents, but you two need to get together, like, tomorrow. But it's not to discuss the golden oldies — tariffs, trade and Taiwan.
'There is an earthshaking event coming — the birth of artificial general intelligence. The U.S. and China are the two superpowers closing in on A.G.I. — systems that will be as smart or smarter than the smartest human and able to learn and act on their own. Whatever you both may think you'll be judged on by history, I assure you that whether you collaborate to create a global architecture of trust and governance over these emerging superintelligent computers, so humanity gets the best out of them and cushions their worst, will be at the top.'
I realize many will consider this wasted breath with all the turmoil unleashed by the new administration in Washington, but that will not deter me from making the point as loudly as I can. Because what Soviet-American nuclear arms control was to world stability since the 1970s, U.S.-Chinese A.I. collaboration to make sure we effectively control these rapidly advancing A.I. systems will be for the stability of tomorrow's world.
A.I. systems and humanoid robots offer so much potential benefit to humanity, but they could be hugely destructive and destabilizing if not embedded with the right values and controls. In addition, this new age must be defined by a lot of planning about what humans will do for work, and how to preserve the dignity they derive from work, when machines will be able to do so many things better than people. Millions of people possibly losing their jobs and dignity at the same time is a prescription for disorder.
A veteran Chinese economist made clear to me that China is very alive to these risks: 'Today, a lot of Chinese cannot find jobs. With A.I. they will not be able to find jobs forever. What happens if they cannot find appropriate jobs' because '70 percent of civil servants are robots? That will be super risky.'
There is no time to lose in thinking about how we adapt, and yet we can be so nearsighted when it comes to the signs and the warnings. A decade from now, what will journalists say was the most important news story in the fall of 2024 that should have received more attention, given the long-term consequences?
Will they say it was the second election of Donald Trump as president in November 2024? Or will they say it was Uber's decision in September 2024 to go beyond its pilot project in Phoenix and start offering driverless, all-electric Waymo cars on its ride-hailing app in Austin and Atlanta — replacing human Uber drivers.
At this point I'd vote for Uber going driverless.
Will they say it was Trump's election in November? Or will they say it was the December 2024 battle in a snowy forest near Kharkiv, Ukraine, reported by The Wall Street Journal, in which Ukrainian forces attacked a Russian bunker with four-wheeled robot drones — some mounted with machine guns or packed with explosives and backed by aerial drones from above — in a 'coordinated unmanned' land and air assault 'on a scale that hadn't previously been done, marking a new chapter of warfare where humans are largely removed from the front line of the battlefield, at least in the opening stages.'
I'll go with all-robot-no-humans Ukrainian air and land assault.
How about one more — something on my mind, since I am attending a conference in China: Will they say it was Trump's November 2024 election, or will they say it was the fact that China's televised Lunar New Year gala this year, watched by over a billion people, featured '16 humanoid robots' taking the stage. 'Clad in vibrant floral print jackets, they took part in a signature … dance, twirling red handkerchiefs in unison with human dancers,' M.I.T. Technology Review reported. In their day job, these robots work assembling electric vehicles. Dancing was just their hobby.
I can see a case for humanoid robot dancers.
All three examples reflect the now growing consensus, as the Times technology writer Kevin Roose recently observed, that full-on A.G.I. is coming faster than most anyone thought — 'very soon — probably in 2026 or 2027 but possibly as soon as this year.'
A.G.I. is the holy grail of A.I. — single systems that can master math, physics, biology, chemistry, material science, Shakespeare, poetry and literature as well as the smartest humans but that can also reason across all of them and see connections no human polymath ever could.
As Craig Mundie, a former chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, put it to me: Probably before the end of Trump's presidency, we will have not just birthed a new computer tool; 'we will have birthed a new species — the superintelligent machine.'
'Our species is carbon-based. This new one is silicon-based,' Mundie explained. 'Therefore, we need to immediately begin to chart a path to coexist with this new superintelligent species and ultimately coevolve with it.'
We humans have lived alongside a lot of other species on this planet for a long time, 'but we were always smarter than all of them,' he added. 'Soon there is going to be a new one that will be smarter than we are and steadily getting smarter. We are expanding what is the highest level of intelligence on the planet — from what humans could imagine and program into computers to what computers can begin to learn themselves, which is virtually boundless.'
The advances that China has made on A.I. in just the past year have made it absolutely clear that Beijing and Washington are now the world's two A.I. superpowers.
And if you thought otherwise, China's premier, Li Qiang, opened the China Development Forum, the event that drew me to Beijing, by proudly noting how China's recently unveiled DeepSeek A.I. system 'burst onto the scene,' highlighting 'the huge power of innovation and creativity of the Chinese people.'
On top of that, he added, '2025 could be the year of mass production of humanoid robots in China.' A recent report by Morgan Stanley described China's dominance over the West in the humanoid robot industry, controlling a majority of the top-listed companies. These are A.I.-infused robots that move and speak remarkably like humans.
Before these A.G.I. systems take hold and scale up, we need the two superpowers to get serious about devising a regulatory and technological framework that ensures an agreement for imbuing these systems with some kind of moral reasoning and embedded usage controls so they are prevented from being used by rogue actors for globally destabilizing activities or going rogue themselves. We need a system of governance that ensures that A.I. systems always operate and police themselves in alignment with both human and machine well-being.
There was a time when many people thought that such a project was something only a coalition of democracies could do — and then present it to the world. Sorry, too late. China has greatly narrowed the gap with us and surpassed the other democracies. This can't be done without Beijing. So guess who's coming to dinner. It's a table for two now. Mr. Trump, Mr. Xi please step this way. History has its eyes on you both.
Alas, though, generating the conditions to allow for Beijing and Washington to collaborate on a uniform system for A.I. trust and governance will be no easy matter for the leaders of China and America.
Nevertheless, listening to Chinese experts and officials at this conference, I sense that the Chinese are a lot like Americans: still trying to get their minds around what new capabilities these new A.I. systems will offer. They are torn between wanting to do everything to make sure their companies win the A.I. race against American ones — so they can dominate the market — and wanting to make sure these technologies don't destabilize their own country.
I am hardly naïve about the level of mistrust in U.S.-China relations today — having spent the last week in both capitals — I can attest it is off the charts. So I am fully aware of how absurd it can sound calling on the two of them to trust each other to collaborate on a system of moral reasoning to ensure we get the best and cushion the worst of A.I.
But our leaders should take a lesson from how software technology companies used 'coopetition' (cooperation between competitors). Apple, Microsoft, Google and Meta all wanted to destroy one another in business, but they eventually realized that if they cooperated on some basic standards, rather then each going its own way, they could massively expand the markets for their otherwise independent products and services.
Once A.G.I. arrives, if we are not assured that these systems will be embedded with common trust standards, the United States and China will not be able to do anything together. Neither side will trust anything it exports or imports to the other, because A.I. will be in everything that is digital and connected. That is your car, your watch, your toaster, your favorite chair, your implant, your notepad. So if there is no trust between us and China and each of us has our own A.I. systems, it will be the TikTok problem on steroids. A lot of trade will just grind to a halt. We'll just be able to sell each other soybeans for soy sauce. It will be a world of high-tech feudalism.
I was taken with how the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, who addressed a packed audience of mostly Chinese people at the forum's session on A.I., put it.
'We should build more trust between humans before we develop truly superintelligent A.I. agents,' Harari said. 'But we are now doing exactly the opposite. All over the world, trust between humans is collapsing. Too many countries think that to be strong is to trust no one and be completely separated from others. If we forget our shared human legacies and lose trust with everyone outside us, that will leave us easy prey for an out-of-control A.I.'
Together humans can control A.I., he added, 'but if we fight one another, A.I. will control us.'
In this specific endeavor of creating trusted A.I., I don't hesitate to say I wish President Xi and President Trump much success — and fast.