We should fret about China, not Facebook
Are we worried about the data-gobbling habits of Facebook and its ancillaries – private companies amassing data with less-than scrupulous regard for our privacy? You bet.
In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica revelations, anyone beyond the dwindling band of techutopians will be more aware of how easy it is to offer up your data to a tech platform or third parties, without understanding who could access it.
But are we concerned or even aware enough about the speed of Artificial Intelligence, or AI, gathering by authoritarian governments, potentially with far greater impact on the global data ecosystem and our own lives? Not remotely. Of the emerging interfaces of policy, regulation and digital innovation, this is the one that troubles me most.
More so than the arrogance of Silicon Valley, because for all the many shortcomings of Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple, they are being dragged into a public debate about their activities and forced to change some of their conduct – or suffer the competitive consequences.
For truly unaccountable power in data-use and AI, look to major state players with weak accountability. Foremost is, China, where the speed of innovation and implementation of robotics and advanced machine learning is matched by a tightening of control by the state.
Last year I interviewed some Chinese tech figures for The Economist and found their scale and ambition awesome; Didi Chuxing, having seen off Uber, is now working with manufacturers to introduce driverless cars to Chinese cities within the decade.
WeChat, the micro-messaging service with nearly a billion users, is the means by which many Chinese customers pay for goods and exchange information, creating a vast info-harvest on how its users live. Hangzhou as the country’s leading the ‘‘smart city’’ can track every resident, their social media activity, purchases and movements. Promethean in its ambition, many of these developments are also prospectively dystopian when it coincides with a system of state surveillance, combined with rejection of the rights of citizens to change their system of government. A pilot scheme in Suining has awarded people points for ‘‘good’’ behaviour, and deducted points for ‘‘bad’’ behaviour, from traffic offences to politically inconvenient activity.
‘‘Social ranking’’ – in which data on everything from your credit score to your traffic fines is logged and coded to produce a score of your usefulness as a civilian – most benefits those who seek to exert control.
These projects are now so closely intertwined with the interests of those who govern China that they appoint its representatives to the boards of major companies – and new laws enshrine the ability of the state to grab data on wide-ranging grounds.
For all the grubbier opportunism of Western tech companies, they have a more cautious relationship with government. A free press means that abuses are revealed and titanic companies such as Facebook can crash into icebergs. Big-data systems in democracies are most often designed for profit, meaning that users have the ultimate sanction of simply switching off their accounts.
By contrast, we are only just starting to pay sufficient attention to the Kremlin’s growing, threatening obsession with AI. The point of Vladimir Putin’s boast about his new nuclear weapons cache was not just the return to Cold War competition in deadly missiles – but that AI might help even up the scales with the US. ‘‘AI,’’ Putin says, ‘‘is key to Russia beating the US in defence.’’
The power and threat of AI lies in the fact that it is now so close to all our lives and impervious to state borders, as companies increasing integrate search engines, speech-recognition and automated customer-service bots into their products and services.
The West cannot opt out of the race against AI developers in undemocratic countries, because it is a globalised business, whose products can be transferred at low cost across borders. That makes it virtually impossible to guard against some data ending up in the wrong hands.
So far, our ability to regulate has lagged: the former UK information commissioner Christopher Graham reckons Britain is 10 years behind developments in data-gathering. But that is changing as the public mood becomes more testing. In an open society, more pressure for transparency, a free flow of information and noisy pressure groups create checks and balances that will help us better understand and deal with AI.
Where these are lacking, beware the true Behemoth of datacollection: largely unaccountable big states embracing big tech.
– Telegraph Group
‘Social ranking’ ... most benefits those who seek to exert control.
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