Xi Jinping is using artificial intelligence to enhance his government’s totalitarian control—and he’s exporting this technology to regimes around the globe.
Uh...which country uses ML in drone strikes? And has trillion dollar corporations that literally depend on AI for their power and use it to make everything worse?
Northwest of Beijing’s Forbidden City, outside the Third Ring Road, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has spent seven decades building a campus of national laboratories
The Asians have spent decades, decades, doing science. They must be stopped!
Near its center is the Institute of Automation, a sleek silvery-blue building surrounded by camera-studded poles.
Of course, camera-studded poles are not present anywhere in the West.
Their more practical innovations—iris recognition, cloud-based speech synthesis—are spun off to Chinese tech giants, AI start-ups, and, in some cases, the People’s Liberation Army.
Hey, Siri, what is PRISM? Oh sorry, forgot you need to look at my face to recognize if it's me.
In my pocket, I had a burner phone; in my backpack, a computer wiped free of data—standard precautions for Western journalists in China.
If a burner phone and a computer "wiped free of data" is enough to defeat the Chinese Panopticon then honestly, bro, China is stuck in the 50s.
*To visit China on sensitive business is to risk being barraged with cyberattacks and malware. *
Dude...don't click on ads on shady porn websites.
In 2019, Belgian officials on a trade mission noticed that their mobile data were being intercepted by pop-up antennae outside their Beijing hotel.
Cop used Stingray. It was super effective.
After clearing the institute’s security, I was told to wait in a lobby monitored by cameras.
Has this person ever been inside any building in the west? Literally any?
*On its walls were posters of China’s most consequential postwar leaders. *
In China, they bombard their citizens with propaganda by putting up posters of past leaders on walls of waiting lobbies. Ignore the statues of confederate leaders and the names of our streets.
Mao...looked serene, as though satisfied with having freed China from the Western yoke.
Damn straight.
grand AI strategy that Xi has laid out in a series of speeches akin to those John F. Kennedy used to train America’s techno-scientific sights on the moon.....Xi’s pronouncements on AI have a sinister edge
JFK and the military's interests in the moon were entirely noble. It definitely did not start as plans for installation of military bases on the moon back in the 50s.
But Xi also wants to use AI’s awesome analytical powers to push China to the cutting edge of surveillance. He wants to build an all-seeing digital system of social control, patrolled by precog algorithms that identify potential dissenters in real time.
I feel I'd just be repeating myself. But goddammit dude, the fuck do you think the west has been doing for literally decades? If China wants to be at the cutting edge of surveillance, then who is there now?
China’s government has a history of using major historical events to introduce and embed surveillance measures. In the run-up to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, Chinese security services achieved a new level of control over the country’s internet.
Patriot Act.
During China’s coronavirus outbreak, Xi’s government leaned hard on private companies in possession of sensitive personal data. Any emergency data-sharing arrangements made behind closed doors during the pandemic could become permanent.
Of course, the US opted to not do shit at all which is a much better tactic. And of course, there isn't any point in mentioning all the western countries using private tech companies to track the spread of the outbreak. No, not at all. Any arrangements they are making are definitely in the good interests of the public.
China already has hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras in place. Xi’s government hopes to soon achieve full video coverage of key public areas.
Two things. Firstly, the West has blown past the goal of only surveilling key public areas. Secondly, it's kinda impressive just thinking about how many public areas China must have that it needs hundreds of millions of cameras.
*Much of the footage collected by China’s cameras is parsed by algorithms for security threats of one kind or another. *
Which is much worse than private companies parsing your video, photo, voice, location etc so they make trillions while you get squat. And the state gets to use it anyways.
In the near future, every person who enters a public space could be identified, instantly, by AI matching them to an ocean of personal data, including their every text communication, and their body’s one-of-a-kind protein-construction schema.
AI being able to parse proteins would literally be one of the greatest developments in the history of medicine. If this is in China's near future, then holy shit they're awesome. But no, it's bad because only companies should own DNA of citizens and have access to all their communications, searches etc etc.
In time, algorithms will be able to string together data points from a broad range of sources—travel records, friends and associates, reading habits, purchases—to predict political resistance before it happens.
Something that never happens in the west. The CIA, NSA etc definitely do not have a gazillion watch-lists and haven't infiltrated any leftist organizations.
China’s government could soon achieve an unprecedented political stranglehold on more than 1 billion people.
Sigh...Facebook has 2 billion users. The CIA literally has backdoors in almost all world communications, including those of almost all foreign government ones. You know...except China.
So when I started I was gonna cover the whole article but I'm tired now. Someone else can carry the flame.
Seriously, thank you for your service. I didn't want to face this article alone. I'll take the next section.
Early in the coronavirus outbreak, China’s citizens were subjected to a form of risk scoring. An algorithm assigned people a color code—green, yellow, or red—that determined their ability to take transit or enter buildings in China’s megacities. In a sophisticated digital system of social control, codes like these could be used to score a person’s perceived political pliancy as well.
Awesome use of new technology to keep people alive! And now for some irrelevant speculation.
A crude version of such a system is already in operation in China’s northwestern territory of Xinjiang, where more than 1 million Muslim Uighurs have been imprisoned, the largest internment of an ethnic-religious minority since the fall of the Third Reich.
Let's just uncritically repeat that number, again. Thanks, @Adrian_Zenz for your efforts!
Once Xi perfects this system in Xinjiang, no technological limitations will prevent him from extending AI surveillance across China. He could also export it beyond the country’s borders, entrenching the power of a whole generation of autocrats.
Entrenching the power of a generation of autocrats is definitely something the much-vaunted West has no interest in whatsoever, nope, nope, nope.
China has recently embarked on a number of ambitious infrastructure projects abroad—megacity construction, high-speed rail networks, not to mention the country’s much-vaunted Belt and Road Initiative. But these won’t reshape history like China’s digital infrastructure, which could shift the balance of power between the individual and the state worldwide.
Those dastardly bastards, building things! Also, shift it how? Which direction?
American policy makers from across the political spectrum are concerned about this scenario. Michael Kratsios, the former Peter Thiel acolyte whom Donald Trump picked to be the U.S. government’s chief technology officer, told me that technological leadership from democratic nations has “never been more imperative” and that “if we want to make sure that Western values are baked into the technologies of the future, we need to make sure we’re leading in those technologies.”
"Democratic nations", nice touch. One wonders what it would mean for Western values to be baked into the technologies of the future, but I guess that's not something worth discussing.
Despite China’s considerable strides, industry analysts expect America to retain its current AI lead for another decade at least.
China's target is 2030, so clearly they expect exactly the same thing.
But this is cold comfort: China is already developing powerful new surveillance tools, and exporting them to dozens of the world’s actual and would-be autocracies.
Such as?
Over the next few years, those technologies will be refined and integrated into all-encompassing surveillance systems that dictators can plug and play.
The emergence of an AI-powered authoritarian bloc led by China could warp the geopolitics of this century. It could prevent billions of people, across large swaths of the globe, from ever securing any measure of political freedom. And whatever the pretensions of American policy makers, only China’s citizens can stop it. I’d come to Beijing to look for some sign that they might.
Wow. Just wow. I think it's my turn to take a break.
Okay so fuck lemmy. I had made a full reply post for the next section and when I clicked reply, it said comment too long and fucking deleted it. I can't even get it back.
The Panopticon Is Already Here
Has been for decades, baby.
Xi Jinping is using artificial intelligence to enhance his government’s totalitarian control—and he’s exporting this technology to regimes around the globe.
Uh...which country uses ML in drone strikes? And has trillion dollar corporations that literally depend on AI for their power and use it to make everything worse?
Northwest of Beijing’s Forbidden City, outside the Third Ring Road, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has spent seven decades building a campus of national laboratories
The Asians have spent decades, decades, doing science. They must be stopped!
Near its center is the Institute of Automation, a sleek silvery-blue building surrounded by camera-studded poles.
Of course, camera-studded poles are not present anywhere in the West.
Their more practical innovations—iris recognition, cloud-based speech synthesis—are spun off to Chinese tech giants, AI start-ups, and, in some cases, the People’s Liberation Army.
Hey, Siri, what is PRISM? Oh sorry, forgot you need to look at my face to recognize if it's me.
In my pocket, I had a burner phone; in my backpack, a computer wiped free of data—standard precautions for Western journalists in China.
If a burner phone and a computer "wiped free of data" is enough to defeat the Chinese Panopticon then honestly, bro, China is stuck in the 50s.
*To visit China on sensitive business is to risk being barraged with cyberattacks and malware. *
Dude...don't click on ads on shady porn websites.
In 2019, Belgian officials on a trade mission noticed that their mobile data were being intercepted by pop-up antennae outside their Beijing hotel.
Cop used Stingray. It was super effective.
After clearing the institute’s security, I was told to wait in a lobby monitored by cameras.
Has this person ever been inside any building in the west? Literally any?
*On its walls were posters of China’s most consequential postwar leaders. *
In China, they bombard their citizens with propaganda by putting up posters of past leaders on walls of waiting lobbies. Ignore the statues of confederate leaders and the names of our streets.
Mao...looked serene, as though satisfied with having freed China from the Western yoke.
Damn straight.
grand AI strategy that Xi has laid out in a series of speeches akin to those John F. Kennedy used to train America’s techno-scientific sights on the moon.....Xi’s pronouncements on AI have a sinister edge
JFK and the military's interests in the moon were entirely noble. It definitely did not start as plans for installation of military bases on the moon back in the 50s.
But Xi also wants to use AI’s awesome analytical powers to push China to the cutting edge of surveillance. He wants to build an all-seeing digital system of social control, patrolled by precog algorithms that identify potential dissenters in real time.
I feel I'd just be repeating myself. But goddammit dude, the fuck do you think the west has been doing for literally decades? If China wants to be at the cutting edge of surveillance, then who is there now?
China’s government has a history of using major historical events to introduce and embed surveillance measures. In the run-up to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, Chinese security services achieved a new level of control over the country’s internet.
During China’s coronavirus outbreak, Xi’s government leaned hard on private companies in possession of sensitive personal data. Any emergency data-sharing arrangements made behind closed doors during the pandemic could become permanent.
Of course, the US opted to not do shit at all which is a much better tactic. And of course, there isn't any point in mentioning all the western countries using private tech companies to track the spread of the outbreak. No, not at all. Any arrangements they are making are definitely in the good interests of the public.
China already has hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras in place. Xi’s government hopes to soon achieve full video coverage of key public areas.
Two things. Firstly, the West has blown past the goal of only surveilling key public areas. Secondly, it's kinda impressive just thinking about how many public areas China must have that it needs hundreds of millions of cameras.
*Much of the footage collected by China’s cameras is parsed by algorithms for security threats of one kind or another. *
Which is much worse than private companies parsing your video, photo, voice, location etc so they make trillions while you get squat. And the state gets to use it anyways.
In the near future, every person who enters a public space could be identified, instantly, by AI matching them to an ocean of personal data, including their every text communication, and their body’s one-of-a-kind protein-construction schema.
AI being able to parse proteins would literally be one of the greatest developments in the history of medicine. If this is in China's near future, then holy shit they're awesome. But no, it's bad because only companies should own DNA of citizens and have access to all their communications, searches etc etc.
In time, algorithms will be able to string together data points from a broad range of sources—travel records, friends and associates, reading habits, purchases—to predict political resistance before it happens.
Something that never happens in the west. The CIA, NSA etc definitely do not have a gazillion watch-lists and haven't infiltrated any leftist organizations.
China’s government could soon achieve an unprecedented political stranglehold on more than 1 billion people.
Sigh...Facebook has 2 billion users. The CIA literally has backdoors in almost all world communications, including those of almost all foreign government ones. You know...except China.
So when I started I was gonna cover the whole article but I'm tired now. Someone else can carry the flame.
Seriously, thank you for your service. I didn't want to face this article alone. I'll take the next section.
Awesome use of new technology to keep people alive! And now for some irrelevant speculation.
Let's just uncritically repeat that number, again. Thanks, @Adrian_Zenz for your efforts!
Entrenching the power of a generation of autocrats is definitely something the much-vaunted West has no interest in whatsoever, nope, nope, nope.
Those dastardly bastards, building things! Also, shift it how? Which direction?
"Democratic nations", nice touch. One wonders what it would mean for Western values to be baked into the technologies of the future, but I guess that's not something worth discussing.
China's target is 2030, so clearly they expect exactly the same thing.
Such as?
Wow. Just wow. I think it's my turn to take a break.
Okay so fuck lemmy. I had made a full reply post for the next section and when I clicked reply, it said comment too long and fucking deleted it. I can't even get it back.
Fuck!
O7
Your valor shall be remembered!