The AI race isn’t happening only between countries. It’s happening between people, too.

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Prof. Lior Zalmanson

This week, the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting took place in Davos, gathering leaders, regulators, and corporate executives to create a shared language on the economy, politics, and technology. This year, artificial intelligence wasn’t “just another topic.” It was the topic: the lens through which people there talked about power, infrastructure, and competition. The refrain was that the world is starting to internalize the political implications of an AI “arms race”: who will build better models, who will secure the chips, who will build the data centers, and above all, who is going to cover the bill.

It’s worth emphasizing that this arms race isn’t playing out only between countries and corporations, but also between individuals. AI use is barely regulated, and the economics are simple: if the tool lets you write faster, submit more, generate more versions, compete more effectively, there is an incentive to use it more, without stopping to think through the consequences. Not because the user is “bad,” but because right now it’s non-use that’s perceived as a disadvantage. The problem is that the cost is often external: compute load, electricity, water, and infrastructure, and it doesn’t show up on anyone’s personal bill.

I listened in Davos to a conversation with Elon Musk, who described a world in which robots and autonomous vehicles will be everywhere in a few years. It was hard not to think of Malcolm Gladwell, who argues that private ownership of autonomous cars could actually make congestion worse. He offers a simple scenario: in a city where parking is scarce such as NYC, someone going to the theater in the evening will stop looking for a spot altogether. It will be easier to drop passengers at the entrance and tell the car to “circle around” slowly for two hours until the show ends. A small private convenience that accumulates into major public congestion.

And still, Musk deserves some credit (even so): when he talks about autonomous cars, he’s talking about robotaxis. Not a world where everyone owns a car, but a world where we don’t need cars at all, because mobility is provided as a service, on demand. In theory, that also addresses the problem Gladwell describes: a taxi fleet has an incentive to reduce empty miles and maximize efficiency, not to roam the streets aimlessly.

I admit there’s something amusing about a conference as capitalist as Davos ending with a fantasy that smells like the loss of private ownership. But before accusing Davos of communism, it’s worth asking a different question: how much power will belong, in such a world, to the person who controls the taxi dispatch station. In this case, Musk. In other words, the solution to human selfishness will probably come through regulation and coordination, but that regulation will be concentrated in the hands of actors who will, in practice, wield more power than ever.