THE HOLY DRIVER WHEN VIRTUAL MEETS REALITY
“The Holy Driver,” chapter six from the book AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan, tells the story of Chamal, a talented and cocky young gamer from Sri Lanka who is recruited to take part in a mysterious Chinese project. At first, the game he’s been tasked with playing is like other driving simulations he’s mastered, but soon it begins to dawn on Chamal that something is very different—very real—about the game’s increasingly more difficult scenarios. Set roughly two decades in the future, “The Holy Driver” examines the various ethical and moral issues around artificial intelligence and autonomy that are sure to arise as the world and technology move forward. The following is an excerpt from the chapter.
Just as he had at the VR Café, Chamal made it to the top of the training center’s ranking list in no time.
He was no longer the beginner who panicked at the sight of traffic and pedestrians. And it wasn’t just driving for driving’s sake. Chamal began receiving missions, with instructions from the technicians in the training center. The missions were always similar in terms of structure, but with variations in story line. Sometimes they were outlandish, like an alien invasion. Sometimes they were chillingly realistic, like a terrorist attack that caused roads to crumble and cars to crash into one another.
Complex landscapes, erratic drivers … nothing could ruffle Chamal. He quickly tallied the most points among the group of gamers that Yang Juan had recruited from all over Sri Lanka. The young drivers became fast friends during their daily training. Still, his cohorts watched Chamal with jealous eyes as he swaggered out of the room each day—everyone knew that more points meant more money.
Other drivers tried to pry tips and tactics out of him. Chamal tossed his hair. “I was born to drive,” he said, a little too cockily.
Chamal had discovered that the game did not give him infinite routes. The landscapes that came up the most frequently were primarily replicas of real-life cities, spanning the Middle East to East Asia: Abu Dhabi Satellite City, Hyderabad, Bangkok, the Singaporean man-made island, the Greater Bay Area of Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao, Shanghai Lingang, Xiong’an New Area, Chiba of Japan—places that, until now, Chamal had only read about online.
One day Chamal received instructions to complete a
