When Chinese leader Mao Zedong and then US president Richard Nixon ended more than two decades of hostility in the early 1970s and began restoring ties, one powerful force pulling them together was a shared adversary in the form of the Soviet Union.
Fast forward to today. The United States and China, the world’s two largest economies, have spent eight years locked in competition and confrontation, from trade and investment to technology, amid mounting fears that they are on a path to inevitable conflict.
Instead of seeing each other as their No 1 adversary, China and the US must once again join hands against another shared and powerful adversary: the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) – to be exact, the near-term malicious exploitation of AI by bad actors and the long-term threat of autonomous AI systems escaping human control and wreaking havoc.
