China's Dystopian Social Credit System | Hacker News Reader

China's Dystopian Social Credit System

abc.net.au

25 pointsrm288919 comments

I'm sort of terrified that democracy, individualism, and freedom might die within the span of a decade or two, with the advent of AI and its abuse by those in power. China will likely also use and leverage this system to monitor and influence external governments and individuals. And I wonder what the spillover of that will be?

There is this anime called psycho-pass, that explores how an AI assigns jobs based on psychological profile aka Psycho-Pass, identify criminals for police to execute or jail etc.

Very good take on how things might be.

Its like reading 1984. But now its happening.

I hope the democracies come together to fight this. We have taken our freedoms for granted. I think we will now have to earn them. We should not forget that modern democracy is just a couple of hundred years old. It is not a given that they will always be around.

I think we have bigger fish to fry closer to home when it comes to preserving whatever versions of democracy we have. We’re not going to effectively fight China when we do so much business with them, and a war would be catastrophic. Meanwhile if you care about freedom and democracy, the (re-)rise of populism, and even fascism seems like something we are capable of fighting.

If we want to change China in the long term, we should probably get our own houses in order so that we can actually occupy the moral high ground. Sweden, Germany, Italy, France Austria, the UK, all have either slid hard to the Right, or have flirted with the likes of Marine Le Pen, Lega Nord, Alternative For Germany, and so on. Then you have Hungary and Poland going fully off the deep end, and oh yes, Trump. All in all our table is full before we pretend thst we have either the political will or leverage to make China change. We might even have to accept that the Chinese people more or less have to fight for change themselves, or not, because we’re too busy doing business with Beijing to worry about their concentration camps.

> If we want to change China in the long term, we should probably get our own houses in order so that we can actually occupy the moral high ground. Sweden, Germany, Italy, France Austria, the UK, all have either slid hard to the Right,

Do i read you correctly that you believe it is impossible to be moral and at the same time hold conservative views?

Only if you read neo-fascism/far-right populism and conservative as the same things, in which case I’d say... yes. I’d point out that by no means did I attempt to conflate those things with conservatism though. I think being moral and believing in smaller governments, gradual change, and other conservative ideas can be consistent with morality. I think that xenophobia, bigotry and a return to the worst ideologies of Europe’s recent past is not.

All in all, it might be helpful to quote me more fully, or not at all, since the fragment you chose is unhelpful taken out of context. I’d like to think that in context, what I meant was clear and hard to take in the sense you seem to want to frame it.

I did not mean to misrepresent your meaning. I think often a heated argumentation starts when people use the same words but have different interpretation of those words. For example, what "right" means. Here it seems you used "Right" to describe neo-fascism/far-right populism when at least me did not read it like that.

I believe this is the root cause of a lot of flame wars on social media.

That's an excellent observation. I find myself conflating 'right' with all the bad things mentioned above, even though I find myself (surprisingly) sympathetic to various elements of this 'right' when I take the time to reflect.

In fact, I've been trying to elaborate, then delete, then elaborate again, and ended up with this non-statement because I feel I can't really properly go into this without the end result causing problems with the 'left' that I mostly identify with. It's incredibly frustrating that even under a badly-managed pseudonym on some online 'forum' I feel inhibited to do so, but I do.

I think it would be good to find better words for the various clusters that exist these days. They'll still be imperfect, but man do we gotta lose the one-dimensional left-right divide...

Oh yes, I agree. We have to get better ourselves too. But having such a stark example in front of us perhaps can help concentrate minds. At least that's my hope.

Every time this topic comes up, I think of Nosedive (Black Mirror S3E1 [1]), and wonder how anyone can think this will end well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)

Meh. I think it will be a net positive imo. Will help in socially engineering a more peaceful country.

As a group it will be good. For an individual it will suck. We all know how difficult it is to change ourselves.

Most foreseeable change I can see is that Chinese tourists being seen as nicer and more friendly as the rude ones with low social scores won’t be able to get a visa.

Last time I checked, freedom of movement is an essential human rights. It's all good as long as it doesn't happen to you right? You see, when you allow someone to dictate every detail of how you should live your life, that means you're being oppressed. We are all different individuals with different needs. Does the person dictating your life have the same needs as you? NO! Someone has set up a template based on their own ideas and completely ignored your own personal preferences. You have been reduced to nothing more than a bot or a walking dead at this point.

One thing I agree is that if this is what China want to do with their country then let them have a go at it. It's their country, people have different values and beliefs in China that citizens from the West will never understand. We can disagree with them, but it is not right for us to interfere or try changing the way how their society functions. Only the future will tell what's best for all of us.

Well.... you may view it as oppression, but they prob view it as the gov taking care of them. 2 sides to the issue.

Collectivists will love it. Individualists will hate it.

I agree completely. As you mentioned, it's collectivism vs. individualism, people from the West with different values and beliefs system would not be able to understand what drives and motivates the average Chinese citizens, and vice versa. We can sit here and point our fingers all day, but does it really matter if the people who live there are happy? The two systems have vastly different principles, it's unreasonable and impossible to conform them into one.

Nothing in life is black and white as we tend to label them. There are always pros and cons in everything. As we approach the age of AI, this chapter could even be considered as a new experiment in the history of humankind. None of us can accurately predict the future so it might actually be beneficial to witness the outcome from such experiment. Good or bad, there will be something here for everyone to learn.

I consider myself rather collectivist, but I don't love it.

If the entity 'taking care' consists, ultimately, of a small group of elites, this really just boils down to a few individualists controlling everyone else. That's far from collectivist!

I'm open to the idea that this is not currently the case, but it wouldn't take much for it to be so. That's why, as a collectivist, I am inclined to be more on the 'hate' than 'love' side.

> As a group it will be good. For an individual it will suck.

If by "group" you mean china's citizens then that assertion makes no sense at all because it's not possible for something to go against the interests of all individuals to be good for all citizens.

On the other hand, if by "group" you mean China's ruling elite then of course it's always in the interest of a totalitarian regime to oppress its citizens.

It’s not against the interests of all citizens.

Some will be supporting it. It will make it easier to trust people.

Human made video game "The Sims", now we have officially reversed it and turn ourselves into those game characters. The AI is now shaping our behaviors and dictating what we buy, eat, and drink. The scores are even live and updated in real time. Well done human, you have played yourself.

it's interesting there aren't alot of comments in this thread.

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