Since its conception, people have feared that an artificial intelligence would turn against humanity and threaten our lives. While this may be a feared outcome several years from now, the most pressing danger right now is the use of AI to oppress millions and facilitate the threat of a controlling regime. .
Confined at home in the pandemic quarantine, my daughter and I saw person of interest on Netflix.
Essentially, the old network series is about a man who has created a nearly omniscient artificial intelligence that monitors everyone through networks of cameras, computers, and smartphones. Every week, our team of heroes, assembled by the creator of the AI, tries to help someone the AI has identified as a possible murder victim. Because this AI was invented by the series’ protagonist, it shows empathy and values human life.
However, in the third season, a second AI is operated on behalf of the government, and this AI does not value human life. He works under the orders and for the benefit of a shadow society, which begins to organize people’s lives for its own ends, including killing people who do not fit into its agenda. It’s frightening.
This show is good television and I recommend it to anyone who regularly reads this blog and is therefore interested in how technology can affect our lives. person of interest can also introduce you to what is currently happening in the most populous country in the world.
I have writing very recently about CCTV and facial recognition in the United States, but American police are constrained by constitutional requirements and there can easily be rrules applied to new technologies that will limit the government’s ability to use them indiscriminately. The United States also has protections for the rights of individuals to assemble and protest, a government that can be changed regularly, and a justice system that generally protects those rights. An independent press sheds light on government behavior deemed to abuse these rights.
So think of a country without any of these checks and balances, without individual rights guaranteed by law, without a free press, without an independent judiciary, and with a one-party dictatorship holding all the power. Now think what would happen if you gave this country unlimited electronic and physical surveillance ranging from hundreds of millions of cameras to drones to capture all phone, text and internet traffic, including searches and social media. Then give that society ever more sophisticated artificial intelligence to manage the flow of information and make sense of all the actions it captures, or even aggregate the complete view of a person’s behavior into a score that determines all important aspects of a person’s life. Get a good score from the government and you get the apartment you want or permission to have a baby. A bad score means roadblocks in your life. This is what China is quickly becoming.
China is not only instituting a surveillance society, including a social rating system for each resident, but it is investing heavily in the artificial intelligence needed to manage everything and assess what cameras, biometric readers and Internet filters capture. According to US military estimates, China will spend $70 billion in public funds on AI development in 2020, up from $17 billion in 2017. US non-military spending on AI this year will be around a billion dollars.
Not only is China building government labs to develop the next generations of AI, but the government’s close coordination with companies like Huawei and Alibaba also provides state-of-the-art private business research oversight. All powered by the supermassive amounts of data produced in the world’s largest surveillance state, as huge datasets are the building blocks of effective AI. China, as The Economist recently observed, is Saudi Arabia data.
The other recommendation I will make in this column is to read Ross Anderson’s article in The Atlantic titled The panopticon is already there, which explains how surveillance, AI, social rating, a one-party state, and political oppression combine in China to both create the first all-knowing social system and export it to other countries. Anderson reports how the entire system is currently being tested in Xinjiang province’s “open air prison”, where Muslim Uyghurs are watched every minute of their lives.
Anderson writes of China’s President, Party leader, and effective dictator, Xi Jinping: “With AI, Xi can build the most oppressive authoritarian apparatus in history, without the manpower Mao needed for dissent information to flow to a single, centralized node. In China’s most prominent AI startups – SenseTime, CloudWalk, Megvii, Hikvision, iFlytek, Meiya Pico – Xi has found willing business partners. And in Xinjiang’s Muslim minority, he found his test population.
Over a million Uyghurs have been imprisoned, which is more political prisoners than any other case since the Nazi concentration camps. John Olivier discussed life in these prisons and re-education camps on his show this week. But Uyghurs who still live in Xinjiang province are subject to checkpoints, constant CCTV and other surveillance and the introduction of Han Chinese “big brothers and sisters” to monitor forced assimilation into communist culture. According to Anderson, “During these checks, the police extract all the data they can from the bodies of Uyghurs. They measure the waist and take a blood sample. They record voices and collect DNA.
And this monitoring and policy compliance testing ground can be easily exported to the rest of the country. Anderson notes, “Once Xi perfects this system in Xinjiang, no technological limitations will prevent him from expanding AI surveillance across China. He could also export it beyond the country’s borders, entrenching the power of a whole generation of autocrats.
Investment in AI drives the whole process. the Atlantic the article states: “Much of the footage collected by Chinese cameras is analyzed by algorithms to detect security threats of one type or another. In the near future, every person who enters a public space could be identified, instantly, by AI matching them with an ocean of personal data, including each of their text communications and their body’s unique protein building pattern. . Over time, algorithms will be able to bring together data points from a wide range of sources – travel records, friends and associates, reading habits, purchases – to predict political resistance before it happens. . The Chinese government may soon achieve an unprecedented political stranglehold over more than a billion people.
Thus, new monitoring tools like robot bird surveillance drones, good enough to entice other birds to fly with them, are already being introduced in China to provide more data on people’s behavior to state-run AI. As stated by C/NET“China also employs facial recognition, artificial intelligence, smart glasses and other technologies to monitor its 1.4 billion citizens with the goal of one day giving each of them a personal score based on their behavior.
Imagine a credit score that, instead of just measuring your behavior and financial capabilities, measures all aspects of your life and your interactions with society. And then imagine your score could determine what kind of apartment you are allowed to have – or whether the government will allow you to live in an apartment. The same goes for your job, educational opportunities, reproduction, and other essential aspects of your life. This is the Chinese social score. As stated in Wired UKalthough part of the current system is voluntary, there are incentives to participate and penalties for non-participation.
Finally, and perhaps most chillingly, China is using its economic clout and private industry to export population control technology to dictators around the world. Anderson observes, “China is already developing powerful new surveillance tools and exporting them to dozens of actual and potential autocracies around the world. Over the next few years, these technologies will be refined and integrated into comprehensive surveillance systems that dictators can plug in and use. »
Could this Orwellian horror be stopped? Xi cannot be removed from office by the Chinese people. The Communist Party has no incentive to remove these control mechanisms, and the deeper the mechanisms are implemented, the less likely the Chinese are to create an uprising against them, as surveillance will stifle any emerging mass protests in the cradle. Democratic ideals must be promoted now, otherwise it will be too late to do so later. We may have already reached the tipping point.
Now that we have a concrete example of how current technology can be used for population control, American citizens should be diligent in holding our government accountable for upholding its constitutional obligations and protecting our freedoms. constitutional. We need to put limits on how our government can use AI tools to monitor our lives.
Copyright © 2022 Womble Bond Dickinson (US) LLP All rights reserved.National Law Review, Volume X, Number 219