Yoshua Bengio Worries About China's Use of AI

At least here in the US, we are following europe and china in less freedom, greater government control and stronger centralized power/data/etc. I doubt canada is any better in this regard.

So where does he see government stepping in when it's in the government's self-interest and it's in the self-interest of the elite s to centralize even further and continue to accumulate wealth/power?

One of the key focal points of the DoD's research is the identification of the topology of social networks and the flow of trust, information, and rumors. The topology and the chokepoints across it which information is distributed are leverage point where ideas can be contended, disrupted, replaced, challenged or seeded. Doing this at scale requires minimal human operation - only enough to convince the targetted population and narrative centers that the propaganda content is legitimate social traffic - and also information systems to infer microculture so that the information programming can be fit inside the moral, judgemental, human, religious and social (e.g. politeness) parameters from large quantities of communication surveillance.

Although Facebook and Google have some obvious problems with privacy, they also do a great service by open sourcing (with patent rights when using some of their open source deep learning projects) some tools that I really depend on for my work.

For the public commons, the public good, there is some strategy for leveraging open source and sharing data that respects privacy, and allows individuals and organizations to create valuable machine learning and AI applications. The are a lot of constraints: privacy, encouraging innovation, allowing fair profit from innovation without killing competition, etc.

In the past I found useful Lawrence Lessig‘s work on legal frameworks like the Creative Commons (I was the featured creative commoner for a few weeks, a long time ago; and, I have released all my recent books with a Creative Commons license even though I also sell copies). I think we need carefully thought out extensions to the Creative Commons licenses and ideas to cover data sharing to promote innovation and some room to earn a profit.

The same lesson applies here in terms of the nightmare of a surveillance that China is building out today: who is going to stop them? The people don't have the legal ability to do much about it, and have few individual rights, so there is almost no political or legal barrier here for China's government to do whatever it wants with its people. There is no real economic barrier any more because their economy is simply too large and, dare I say, diversified. There is no real technological barrier either on the hardware side or the software side, nor are the costs particularly prohibitive. China's neighbors are no real barrier either since they have little comparable military strength (short of US involvement and a general world war), and they all depend too much on China's economy anyway. And "the West" can't do much except scream and shout for much of the same reasons.

In short, there is really nothing that is stopping the Chinese government from rolling out the first, real, honest-to-god, 1984-style police surveillance state, and the potential capabilities are, frankly, terrifying. Those not involved in machine learning these days may not be able to appreciate it, but the tech is there for pretty much anything you can think of (as far as wide scale automated surveillance, tracking, etc. right down to the individual level at nearly every minute of the day at nearly any point in the country). It exists _already_, it's just a matter of investment capability and political will to make it happen, and China has both of those in spades.

We're talking surveillance of the individual via face tracking, but we're also talking about gait tracking, the tracking of facial expressions (and inference from there to emotion and thoughts), of eye tracking, picking up on little hesitations in body language, of the ability to tracking individuals vehicles, of tracking people as they enter a subway and then exit somewhere else entirely, of tracking of every financial transaction, of your network and cell usage, your power usage. Cameras, drones, and whatever else that will have the resolution to pick up on the text of what you're reading and carrying, of little patterns of evidence on your person. THe amount of enthusiasm you express at a political event or public sports event. Not just the content of your voice, but the tone, and what can be inferred from that. What you're reading, what you're clicking on, how long your mouse hovers over an image. And in all of these things, new inferences will be able to be made that weren't possible before, like estimates on your inner thought process, of intent, of you're long-term threat or lack thereof, all the things that you can currently hide away in private.

It's fucking crazy, and the tech for it, at least at the fundamental level, it's already here.

China will be the first state in history to actually pull off an actual 1984-style surveillance state, and to the detriment of every normal person there, and the eventual determinant to billions more once they start normalizing and exporting it.