US, China have a common foe. It’s not the USSR

The summit between President Trump and President Xi Jinping in Beijing next week could be the most significant encounter between American and Chinese leaders since Richard Nixon met Mao Zedong in Beijing in 1972.
That summit eased decades of Sino-American animosity and forged a tacit alliance between the US and China against the Soviet Union.
This summit comes at a similar transformational moment in world affairs, when there is a new shared threat to both China and America. It is a metastasising disorder that could destabilise the world and harm both countries unless they figure out a way to simultaneously compete and collaborate against a growing list of challenges.
These challenges can be successfully confronted only by their collective action — starting with the US and China together creating guardrails against the malign uses of AI, now that the latest models have demonstrated staggeringly powerful cyberattack capabilities.
Two paradigm shifts have changed the world since the Nixon-Mao summit. The first — still not widely appreciated, although the alarm bells are now ringing off the wall — is the emergence of these new, asymmetric artificial intelligence tools that could superempower small, malign actors, be they fighters, anarchists, criminals, political groups, or small nation-states.
Two guys in a cave with a laptop, access to the latest AI models and a Starlink terminal could attack the critical infrastructure of any society.
The second has to do with globalisation. The Nixon-Mao summit began the process of taking the world from disconnected to much more connected and then interconnected.
When Nixon and Mao began easing China out of its isolation from the global economy — which Deng Xiaoping then vastly accelerated by shifting China to state-led capitalism — they unleashed a cascade of economic and technological forces.
By the time the early 21st century rolled around, the combination of China joining the World Trade Organization and the world being wired with the Internet meant that more people in more places could compete, connect and collaborate in more ways for less money on more things than at any other time in human history. It is why I wrote a book in 2005 titled ‘The World Is Flat.’
It is in the nature of technological change, though, that each major step forward comes faster than the previous one, because it builds on the tools that the previous era unleashed. So, years after I argued that the world is flat, technology and other forces marched on and took us, as Dov Seidman, the founder of The HOW Institute for Society, argued, from interconnected to interdependent, or as he puts it, from flat to 'fused.'
You could unplug from the flat world. There is no escaping the fused world. We are all going to rise and fall together now.
That is not only because advances in the Internet, smartphones, fibre optics, satellites and wireless communication have fused us technologically more than ever before.
It is also because a set of planetary-scale challenges has fused our fates together more than ever before as well. These challenges are so large in scope and so indifferent to national borders that no single state, however powerful, can address or escape them alone.
We know what they are: mitigating climate change, preventing the spread of nuclear and biological weapons, managing global migrations, controlling pandemics, keeping global supply chains that we all now depend on operating smoothly and — most important and immediate — managing this new AI species we have conjured up.
We have been able to postpone or get by with limited collaboration on many of these planetary-scale issues, but time is up on AI’s cyberattacking powers. There is no kicking this can down the road. There is no more road. - New York Times