A Shanghai startup’s demo of its system for facial recognition.
Christina Larson, Technology Review: Who needs democracy when you have data?
Here’s how China rules using data, AI, and internet surveillance.
In 1955, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published a short story about an experiment in “electronic democracy,” in which a single citizen, selected to represent an entire population, responded to questions generated by a computer named Multivac. The machine took this data and calculated the results of an election that therefore never needed to happen. Asimov’s story was set in Bloomington, Indiana, but today an approximation of Multivac is being built in China.
For any authoritarian regime, “there is a basic problem for the center of figuring out what’s going on at lower levels and across society,” says Deborah Seligsohn, a political scientist and China expert at Villanova University in Philadelphia. How do you effectively govern a country that’s home to one in five people on the planet, with an increasingly complex economy and society, if you don’t allow public debate, civil activism, and electoral feedback? How do you gather enough information to actually make decisions? And how does a government that doesn’t invite its citizens to participate still engender trust and bend public behavior without putting police on every doorstep?
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WNU Editor: Welcome to the future. This is my must read post for today.
3 comments:
Google, Facebook,Youtube and Twitter have got to be dueling over these policies.
"Random questioning" and "random strip searching" and "random detention" of international visitors will also increase. The access the Chinese have to data goes way beyond their borders and if you go to China and can be compromised and are of value to them, good luck.
All we need to do is provide false information; lie, distort and over emphasize stories and information. Then, the AI won't work very well.
Hmm, sounds like our Media.
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