Microsoft president: Orwell’s 1984 could happen in 2024
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Like the assertions in your comment?
I think the threat isn’t just AI being used by governments to control citizens. Advertising companies want to influence behavior too, and their customers are mostly private corporations. They already have a lot of power and advertising is a $100+ Billion dollar industry for a reason.. it works.
If you haven’t seen it, I’d encourage you to watch Can’t Get You Out of My Head by Adam Curtis, which talks a lot about the increasing influence corporations have on the masses (by using technology): https://youtu.be/pga0Oi1cZvo
And of course, the next level of this is to tailor the articles you see, their content, and the response you get online specifically to you. Eventually, these systems will get progressively better and influencing your specific opinion. Social media giants can also affect things like which events you end up going to, the people you meet, who you end up in a relationship with, which jobs you apply to, etc. Soon it will be possible for corporations and governments to have sophisticated, subtle, relatively fine-grained influence over your life and that of your friends. You'd better hope Google and Facebook view your success and emotional well-being as good for their profits, otherwise, they could try to optimize your life for different outcomes.
I worked on bot detection at Google for a while. There are lots of ways to detect them that aren't based on analysing the quality of writing. We were able to get a very long way with a tiny team playing tricks with JavaScript and that was hardly the peak of what's achievable if there were to ever be a real "bot crisis".
At any rate, Brad Smith's argument in the linked news story isn't about bots writing messages to affect politics. He's concerned about the far more plausible problem of bots transcribing everything you say or do inside your own homes and then uploading it to the mothership for analysis. This is a far more plausible problem because "third parties spamming forums" puts well resourced tech firms in the defense position, but Smith's scenario puts them in the adversarial position. And it could happen today. Nothing stops Google pushing a software update that runs their voice recognition models 24/7 in the background and uploads transcripts of things people are saying to their datacenters for sentiment analysis, except maybe that a few geeks would notice battery drain, but no problem, if Google is doing it then most likely there are sympathisers to the cause at other local tech firms who will collaborate to cover it up. Previously even they would have been stopped by the cost, but advances in AI have driven the cost of speech recognition through the floor. It's entirely feasible now to consider recording, transcribing and filtering the entire world's conversations, all the time.
And that's a real problem. When I hear stories from former friends and colleagues who are still at Google I feel I hardly recognize what the company has become. If they're willing to erase people en-masse from their platform and fire workers for pointing out obviously true things (like "SARS-CoV-2 might have leaked from the nearby lab doing experiments on similar viruses" or "women are on average less interested in computers than men"), who knows if or when their employees might decide that e.g. listening in on popular conservative politicians in their own homes is justified? Certainly, Pichai cannot be trusted to reign in these kinds of behaviours if the past 5 years is anything to judge by, nor is there any obvious way to stop them from doing it given the root-like access Play Services has to people's phones.
[1] there are studies trying to spot correlations between political campaign spending vs voting outcomes by district and IIRC they conclude that it works up to a low level, but probably only by informing people there's a vote happening in the first place, and beyond that it hardly seems to matter. Trump beating Clinton despite a 1:2 spending ratio provides a large scale anecdotal example of this effect.
“Early in the Reticulum[Internet]—thousands of years ago—it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said.
“Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him.
“Yes—a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs[Computers] whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.”
“What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.
“Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors—swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.”
“As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules[networks], you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid–First Millennium A.R.”
“Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis[technology] leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita [IT Department] forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.”
“So, are Artificial Inanity systems still active in the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies?” asked Arsibalt, utterly fascinated.
“The ROBE evolved into something totally different early in the Second Millennium,” Sammann said dismissively. “What did it evolve into?” Jesry asked.
“No one is sure,” Sammann said. “We only get hints when it finds ways to physically instantiate itself, which, fortunately, does not happen that often. But we digress. The “functionality of Artificial Inanity still exists. You might say that those Ita who brought the Ret[Net] out of the Dark Age could only defeat it by co-opting it. So, to make a long story short, for every legitimate document floating around on the Reticulum, there are hundreds or thousands of bogus versions—bogons, as we call them.”
“The only way to preserve the integrity of the defenses is to subject them to unceasing assault,” Osa said, and any idiot could guess he was quoting some old Vale aphorism.
“Yes,” Sammann said, “and it works so well that, most of the time, the users of the Reticulum don’t know it’s there. Just as you are not aware of the millions of germs trying and failing to attack your body every moment of every day.”
—Neal Stephenson, Anathem
First, we have to define what "AI" is. In the current context, it might be Machine Learning or a collection of algorithms defining what to display to a give user, for example. Both ML and algorithms are completely neutral by themselves, it is their use that makes them "dangerous". You can use it for decades, e.g. collecting data from sensors and classifying them, an nothing bad happens.
But the moment a human being connects a software system to an actuator - news feed, an engine, a rocket, an x-ray machine - they explicitly take responsibility for the functioning of such a connected system. If it fails, putting the blame on "AI" is ridiculous.
Possibly related Noam Chimpsky paraphrased superaccuratequote - "Look at all the conflicts China is involved in, they're regional. They don't venture anywhere close to our territory. It's all posturing to coerce the obedience of their own population. Ultimately they represent no real threat and are being cast as a boogieman possibly to coerce our obedience. My name is Noam Chomsky. I teach at Arizona Community College now for some reason and Im probably a millionaire."
Seriously though the most Orwellian part of this whole thing might (might) be Big Tech Brother casting China as the perpetual Eurasian superenemy.
Or not? Idunno I wouldn't take a job in China.
The notion that China's conflicts are only regional is nonsense.
A low quality hodgepodge of words, masquerading as an article promoting the BBC's Panorama's Are you Scared Yet, Human?
A few low quality choice of quotes:
Speaking to BBC's Panorama, Brad Smith said it will be "difficult to catch up” with the rapidly advancing technology.
Eric Schmidt, former Google chief executive who is now chair of the US National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, has warned that beating China in AI is imperative.
Seth Moulton, chair of the US Future of Defence Task Force is urging tech companies to support the Department of Defence. "Because we're in a race, because we are in this competition, that’s really what it comes down to,” he said. “Are you going to help us win this race or are you going to essentially be against us?"
Are we sure this Ministry of Truth style doublespeak isn't already here?
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/26/facebook-ban-covid-...
Ah yes, Eric "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" Schmidt. I'm sure he has my best interests at heart when he advocates for an AI arms race with China.
(Note that this also requires defeating the same kinds of forces domestically.)
Couldn't we just as easily say "beating China at not starting the zombie apocalypse" requires ensuring China doesn't invest in weird chemical experimentation with death and voodoo?
We're taking as a given that China's end state is a repressive dystopia, just as we would have to take as a given that China would start a zombie apocalypse. The only difference in one is seen as patently absurd by all people, and the other is only seen that way by some.
Is it? I know that's how it's presented, and it's easy to assume that presentation is accurate, but do most the people living there see it that way? I don't doubt it's a repressive dystopia for those that are repressed, and that's horrible, but does that make it a repressive dystopia overall? Because I'm pretty sure there's quite a number of different subgroups I could pick out in the U.S. that would say we live in a repressive dystopia already.
> I feel like I'm going crazy seeing people make absurd comparisons like this.
It was made absurd on purpose, to not muddy the waters with a comparison to something that people could have actual questions about.
> Are you playing at some broader rhetorical point
I thought that was obvious with the "begging the question" part, which literally means that something is being used as fact that hasn't been proven.
I'm not saying China is great, or better than the U.S. or west or anything. What I am saying is that when people throw around statements that assume China's natural end state, and what they are moving towards right now, is a repressive dystopia, I'm going to want to see some evidence or reasoning to back it up. Otherwise how do I know it's not just "everything I've read in USA Today the last few years leads me to believe that, therefore it must be true"?
The other half is which we "we" (whoever we are, there's an international audience, but it's probably safe to say either the U.S. or the west) are trending? We're unlikely to beat China at that no matter what we do if we only focus on them and not ourselves as well.
And to tie it all together, part of not becoming a repressive dystopia ourselves is not trusting the narrative put out about other countries by our government without evidence and looking for reasons why that narrative may be beneficial to put forth other than the truth. Put another way, the first step in protecting your right to question things is to actually question things.
Assuming charitably that you perhaps just didn't read some comments fully, "Has China gotten more repressive over time, or less repressive?" has fairly obvious answers involving "Uighurs, suppression of speech, Hong Kong, military expansion, political influence, the Great Firewall" that didn't exist before and that you've not addressed at all.
Thanks for reminding me that I can actually question things. One critical component of questioning things is that you look at available information and address questions to what we think we know, not dismiss available information and say we shouldn't trust everything we read. With that in mind, what questions do you have about available information about China's repressive dystopia?
Not meant to be dismissive, not what I said, and not what I was trying to convey. I'll say it again and very clearly: first prove that China is or is moving towards a repressive dystopia.
> has fairly obvious answers involving "Uighurs, suppression of speech, Hong Kong, military expansion, political influence, the Great Firewall" that didn't exist before and that you've not addressed at all.
Stating things that exist is not an examination of whether they they were better or worse than previously, or how periods of time compare.
- Uighurs. They're being oppressed. Are the the first group China has oppressed? If not, then does their oppression seem more or less heavy handed and extreme than those examples that came previously? I don't know enough to compare them, but there has been opression of Tibetans in China for decades, possibly since the inception of the communist party there.
- Hong Kong - This is China exerting control in a way similar to what it does for the rest of its country over an island they believe is part of their country. Is this China becoming more repressive, or just applying the same standards its known for to a populace that was not previously subject to it. It sucks, but is it necessarily an example of China becoming more oppressive? I'm not so sure. Any capitulation at all on China's part, even if a far cry from what people in Hong Kong want, might be a net lessening of repression in China if allowed in other locales of their country.
- Military expansion - Hardly an example of one thing over another. Military expansion is orthogonal to whether they are repressive or a dystopia. If the populace supports it (and all indications I've seen are that the Chinese people are experiencing a massive surge of nationalism as their country comes to prominence), then it hardly needs to be repressive.
- Great Firewall - Taken in context, this is much more ambiguous than presented I think. In 2008, only 22% of Chinese citizens had even used the internet.[1] It's only at about 71% as of 2021. When the Great Firewall was implemented in 1997, I see some indications that well under a million people even had access to it in China.[2] It's speculation on my part, but I have to think given China's goals that there would be a lot less people with access to any sort of internet if they didn't have some control mechanism in place. So is the Great Firewall an example of increasing repression, or slowly opening up to outside information and influences, but just not all at once? I imagine the average Chinese citizen has far more access to information from outside their country than they did in the past, even with the Great Firewall.
> that didn't exist before and that you've not addressed at all.
I didn't address them because throwing out names of things is not an argument. No argument was put forth, because if a coherent one was you would think they might examine these things as I have and acknowledge that they think they are evidence of increased oppression in spite of that. I would accept that as someone putting in the effort to understand what they were talking about, rather than just putting forth something without any real indication that it makes sense.
> One critical component of questioning things is that you look at available information and address questions to what we think we know, not dismiss available information and say we shouldn't trust everything we read. With that in mind, what questions do you have about available information about China's repressive dystopia?
I outlined them above. I'm not expecting you or anyone else to accept them as fact. I honestly don't know enough about China to know how the majority of those items stand up to scrutiny, but I've been hearing about China for enough decades now to realize the bad things I hear are all pretty much the same things rehashed or done over again, but there are other things I hear which I didn't use to which are promising, so I think it's something that actually deserves some attention and a fair shake at being discussed, whether it turns out they seem to be getting worse or better.
And, to be clear, yet again, because this entire set of exchanges seems to be people thinking I'm defending China for no reason and think they're great or something, I have no real love for China. I think they do lots of horrible shit. I have never been there, I have no investments there, I have no relations or family involved with it in any way I'm aware of. But purely on a humanitarian level, I think there might just be cause to be optimistic on China's future outlook, because even though it's hard to get good useful information on it, to me it seems like it might just be trending in a good direction, even if it might take a long time to get to something we would consider acceptable. I would want to know if I'm wrong through, and I'm willing to accept arguments that I'm wrong, but if you look you'll see a dearth of argument provided here. I want to know if I'm wrong, but I'm not going to let people just yell "you're wrong!" at without evidence be what convinces me. And if people don't know enough to argue about those things (at least as little as I do which allows me to put them in some minimal context), what are they doing throwing them out as evidence?
1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/236963/penetration-rate-...
2: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Internet-Users-in-China-...
Apparently you know that oppression of Uighurs is ongoing and horrific but somehow the possibility that they're not the first group they've oppressed could be...promising? I don't know what to make of this logic. China hasn't stopped oppressing Tibetans, so this (relatively) new repression of Uighurs is literally more oppression than they've done before.
And you're well aware of the benighted takeover of Hong Kong, but once again willing to overlook it as an example of repressive dystopia because it's now the same as the rest of China...which is also currently oppressed and lacks basic freedom. I don't even know what "a net lessening of repression in China" is supposed to mean; Hong Kong used to have plenty of freedom that it now lacks, while the rest of China hasn't gained freedom from entrance of Hong Kong. The most charitable interpretation of this logic is that you meant to say an "average lessening of repression", except that doesn't mean there's less repression at all, the borders of China have just been redefined to change the average.
Then you ask "So is the Great Firewall an example of increasing repression, or slowly opening up to outside information and influences, but just not all at once?", a twisted question that pretends as if "slowly opening up to outside information and influences" is somehow not a repressive dystopia, as if it's not a horrifically totalitarian action that assumes the state can justify controlling what outside information & influence is allowed to be seen by citizens, the very foundation and core of a repressive dystopia. If the US did the same thing, would you not say that it's a repressive dystopia? Without government intervention, the public would have widespread access to independent information. And then of course China has only tightened its grip on media & press in the last 3 years [1].
I'll grant that "military expansion" is not repressive in itself but simply denotes the fact that China's repressive dystopia is becoming more powerful.
I'm at least relieved that you know the horrific facts of what's going on, but it seems to me that you're just turning a blind eye to the depiction of repression that they represent.
I am curious though what you're referring to when you say "other things I hear which I didn't use to which are promising".
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-parliament-media/ch...
No, it shows it in a small subset. You would have to look at it in context and overall. Adding one method of oppression but stopping or loosening two others might be a net reduction. That's my point. Throwing out specific instances because they get a lot of coverage is not evidence I'm willing to let decide this by itself.
> You seem pretty aware on the facts of China's oppression but willfully deny their depiction of a repressive dystopia.
I don't think that's an accurate depiction of my position.
> Apparently you know that oppression of Uighurs is ongoing and horrific but somehow the possibility that they're not the first group they've oppressed could be...promising?
If their oppression is less harsh than other peoples China has oppressed in the past? Maybe.
> And you're well aware of the benighted takeover of Hong Kong, but once again willing to overlook it as an example of repressive dystopia because it's now the same as the rest of China
Not what I said, not an accurate depiction of my position.
> I don't even know what "a net lessening of repression in China" is supposed to mean
I thought it was fairly self explanatory. If the situation in Hong Kong proceeds with China the victor but also results in some lessening of restrictions in China generally because of the conflict or negotiation or whatever happens in the end, that might be a net benefit. Hong Kong has less than 10 million people. Their lives would get worse. China has 1.4 billion people. What if their lives get a little better?
> The most charitable interpretation of this logic is that you meant to say an "average lessening of repression", except that doesn't mean there's less repression at all, the borders of China have just been redefined to change the average.
Right on the first part, wrong on the second, with regard to my point, which I explained again above.
> a twisted question that pretends as if "slowly opening up to outside information and influences" is somehow not a repressive dystopia
No, I made no claim that it's not not repressive. I do make a claim that it may points toward a lessening of repression, which is my point, as that may indicate the eventual place China ends up in is not a repressive dystopia (relatively. Some people would classify the U.S. as a repressive dystopia, but I'm not interested in arguing that).
> If the US did the same thing, would you not say that it's a repressive dystopia?
If the U.S. went from zero or few restrictions to some or more restrictions, I would say it's tending towards repression or having more repression. I would classify a reduction or elimination of those as tending towards less repression.
I think the fact the internet is allowed at all in China is likely a step towards less repression than what existed before for the majority of their citizens.
> And then of course China has only tightened its grip on media & press in the last 3 years
Thank you. Actual evidence. I'm fully willing to see and consider actual evidence as to one thing or another, and if you pay careful attention this entire thread has been me asking people to justify their position with evidence. I'm fully willing to admit China if someone provides evidence, or at this point provides actual reasoning for the things I've had to outline myself because nobody else would, as they were stated without explanation or context as if they were self evident (which I think I've at least shown they shouldn't necessarily be taken as such).
> I'm at least relieved that you know the horrific facts of what's going on, but it seems to me that you're just turning a blind eye to the depiction of repression that they represent.
I'm not. But we're not talking about the existence of those, we're talking about whether they are at a stable, increasing or lessening level of occurrence and intensity.
> I am curious though what you're referring to when you say "other things I hear which I didn't use to which are promising".
The Chinese population is becoming more educated, affluent and connected. These are people that have more resources and capability to impart change, and more desire to impart change when they feel empowered and encounter something they feel is wrong.
China has opened up their economy quite a bit. They have encouraged a lot out outside influence and involvement compared to the past, not just economically. Overall, they are bigger actors on the national stage and with a lot more bidirectional influence with countries and companies.
I think all of that leads to China actually caring more and responding more positively to outside calls for change with regard to negative policies.
I see these as positives when taking a long view of China.
Are you aware of what's happening to Uighurs? Systematic rape & torture in concentration camps [1], ethnic cleansing on a scale that can be seen in population growth stats [2]. An educated person like you who knows about Uighur oppression surely knows about what's happening. What oppression is this relatively improving upon?
Do you want to argue that China's treatment of Uighur could be relatively better? Why don't you start by saying something in support of that assertion. It's hard to take "maybe it is" as a serious response.
> Hong Kong has less than 10 million people. Their lives would get worse. China has 1.4 billion people. What if their lives get a little better?
Ok, how has HK's brutal annexation improved the oppression on the rest of China? This is just another "maybe it's better?" response.
> I think the fact the internet is allowed at all in China is likely a step towards less repression than what existed before for the majority of their citizens.
Again, this is twisted totalitarian logic. The CCP's dystopian restrictions were never necessary or even helpful in allowing Chinese access to the internet/media. You cannot take away something rightfully & naturally theirs then restore it in a lesser state and claim this is a net benefit.
> The Chinese population is becoming more educated, affluent and connected. (...) China has opened up their economy quite a bit. (...) I think all of that leads to China actually caring more and responding more positively to outside calls for change with regard to negative policies.
So, are you going to point out examples of this? Let's recount some things that happened during China's affluent rise in no particular order:
- The CCP began an unprecedented ethnic cleansing and targeted detainment campaign on Uighurs
- They brutally annexed a formerly liberal Hong Kong and removed their freedoms while not borrowing any liberal policies from HK to the rest of the mainland
- Xi became president for life and enshrined his name and ideology into the constitution [3]
- Destroyed Jack Ma as a govt critic [4] - one of the most elite members of the affluent, educated, connected class you suggest is being empowered. He's been indefinitely detained and removed from his life's work while his character has been assassinated on government controlled social media with an online mob incited in hatred against him.
- Exporting its censorship by leveraging its newfound economic connections with Hollywood [5]
- Expelled foreign journalists [6]
So do you have examples of lessening oppression from all this economic growth you speak glowingly of? It's lovely to hear that "all of that leads to China actually caring more", but I hope you haven't forgotten to demonstrate why that is possibly true.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55794071
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-53220713
[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-43361276
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/technology/china-jack-ma-...
[5] https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-53676789
[6] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/chinese-officials-stifle-e...
No, I wanted someone to actually to actually make arguments and think about the issue, and present some facts. You've done this. People keep asking why I'm not making assertions defending China on these issues. That was never my intention. I stated my intention from the beginning. Perhaps people thought I was being facetious and trying to troll them? I wasn't.
> Ok, how has HK's brutal annexation improved the oppression on the rest of China? This is just another "maybe it's better?" response.
It probably hasn't. Maybe it will have some benefit in the future? The situation hasn't shaken out completely yet. If there's no softening of any policies on China's side for the general populace that comes from this, I would definitely call it an absolute negative outcome. If the normalization of rights of those in Hong Kong to those of an average Chinese citizen (a loss for those of Hong Kong to be sure) results in China allowing some more freedoms though, it's less cut and dry.
FWIW, rule of Hong Kong reverted back to China in 1997, and was not an annexation even then to my knowledge, so that terminology might be incorrect. What we have here is China going back on an agreement it made with the people of Hong Kong at that time regarding their rights.
> The CCP's dystopian restrictions were never necessary or even helpful in allowing Chinese access to the internet/media. You cannot take away something rightfully & naturally theirs then restore it in a lesser state and claim this is a net benefit.
That only makes sense in a system where you already had access. China always censored outside media, such as news, magazines, literature, movies and television. That a large pipe of random data is allowed through only partially vetted is unequivocally more access than the carefully vetted list of items allowed through previously.
To argue otherwise is like arguing that women going from not being allowed to own a business to being allowed to own a business is no gain at if they still didn't have the right to vote. Freedom are not always binary, and even when they are binary, they contribute to a total state that is an amalgamation of different things. Nobody (sane) would argue that we have all the freedoms there are to have in the United States, but I definitely think we're more free than China.
> So, are you going to point out examples of this?
Middle class rise in China[1] has risen to a phenomenal degree, and their middle class spends more than any other nation.[2]
They use Special Economic Zones[3] to experiment with more free economies.
The fact we had a trade war with them recently points towards the fact that there is leverage here, and there, which allows for dialogue in a way that allows for pressure from the rest of world on China, as they are dependent on on the west and the rest of the world to provide the level of comfort their people have become accustomed to through increased economic activity. I don't believe the prior Peesident was effective, or could be effective in this role, for many reasons, so I have hopeful for the near future, even if the relationship is still in a shambles.
> - The CCP began an unprecedented ethnic cleansing and targeted detainment campaign on Uighurs
Yes, bad.
> - They brutally annexed a formerly liberal Hong Kong and removed their freedoms while not borrowing any liberal policies from HK to the rest of the mainland
I don't think this is an accurate assessment of the situation (about half accurate? Seriously, if you're reading sources calling it an annexation, that's odd and you should look into why they are presenting it that way when it's plenty bad enough without that), nor do I think it's over, so I'm not sure it's a point in either direction.
> Xi became president for life and enshrined his name and ideology into the constitution
Sort of tangential. It's not like they went from electing leaders to not. They went from a ruling party that promoted from within based on their own criteria to one person doing the same. I'm not sure there's a measurable difference here WRT what we're talking about.
> Destroyed Jack Ma as a govt critic [4] - one of the most elite members of the affluent, educated, connected class you suggest is being empowered.
I don't think one person is the same as a class of people. But perhaps this will be something pointed to in the future as a point where the middle class took more note.
> - Exporting its censorship by leveraging its newfound economic connections with Hollywood [5]
Let's not look to Hollywood as a bastion of freedom. Regardless of the story they pitch, they've always been about money. This is no different than they've always been with inside interests. No large movie meant to be sold to the masses risks offend large interests or groups that might affect the bottom line too much, and this is the same as it ever was.
> - Expelled foreign journalists
I'm not sure this can be taken as an indicator given current events. A lot (most?) of them were American journalists, which points towards it being more related to ongoing diplomatic relations with the United States which is the cause there (and let's be clear, it's not like the United States wasn't trying to nationalize a Chinese company less than a year ago, so this spat has definitely spilled over into other areas besides foreign policy). It could also be because of increased scrutiny into the origins of COVID-19, which while really not great, I wouldn't classify as meaning quite the same thing.
Those are all really good points, and evidence, so thank you for bringing them to the conversation. That's really all I was trying to do, get people go from believing that something as large and tied to enough variables as what China is going to be like in the future could be stated to be a certain way without evidence to thinking more deeply about it and providing evidence. It might be that China is getting worse right now. I'm not sure I know enough to make that determination (so many of the things we've discussed are deep and require more attention, but at a minimum the Uighur situation does not bode well for the future of China), but I just don't like people being so flippant with something so immense that's about so many people, so decided to stir the pot a bit in an effort to get people to actually define what they thought and look closer at the issues, since I suspect most of us are working off headlines and ledes, and not a very deep understanding of what's actually going on as a whole.
In any case, thanks for participating. I hope some of the stuff you found and presented was new to you (which means you learned something). Some of it was to me, which is always a good thing.
1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/875874/middle-class-popu...
2: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/FP_2020...
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_economic_zones_of_Chin...
It's not my intention to continue this thread forever but I want to clear up one notable thing:
> That only makes sense in a system where you already had access. China always censored outside media, such as news, magazines, literature, movies and television.
This isn't true. China's internet access began in 1994 and it did not start with a great firewall, but it wasn't long until 1998 when the CCP began the Great Firewall project fearing a new network they could not control [1]. Here's an excerpt from a Chinese news outlet about the internet at the time [2]:
> On September 14, 1987, Chinese and German scholars jointly drafted an email "Cross the Great Wall and Go to the World" in Beijing
Apparently written before the CCP built another wall.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall (History section)
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20140219141011/http://www.chinan...
That's what I'm here for, interesting conversations with different viewpoints. :)
> but it wasn't long until 1998 when the CCP began the Great Firewall project fearing a new network they could not control
Yes, but I covered this before (a few replies up-thread). I think (think, because the numbers aren't exact, but I don't think my extrapolation from the source I listed there is out of bounds) under a million people had access to it at that time. That's less than 0.1% of the populace. I don't think we can treat that as something they considered allowing all the populace to have. I think the only reason it wasn't firewalled immediately is because they didn't have the technology, they didn't know yet the threat they were facing, they didn't care too much while it was so limited and only available to what were likely elites, or some combination thereof. I don't think we can assume the lack of control before that point was because they didn't care about the flow of information and decided to become more hard-line later, just that they didn't have a solution in place yet but were thinking and planning on something well before it was allowed for more than the tiniest fraction of the populace.
Chinese citizens are allowed to communicate on the "internet" in the same way the citizens in Orwell's 1984 were allowed to watch TV on telescreens that surveilled them. Probably more useful than not having a telescreen, yet still more repressive and dystopian.
It's not ambiguous as evidence of current behavior, I just don't think it points towards increased control of media as much as it actually points towards less control (even if because it's harder to control without blocking entirely) than in the past. Put another way, I think the total outside information the average Chines citizen is able to get now, even with the great firewall, is vastly greater than it was 25 years ago for vastly more people. Even those citizens that weren't firewalled back in 1996 have vastly more information now, just because there's so much more on the internet now. I think if China was doing more of a continuation of past hardline policies, it wouldn't be a blacklist and some sources that were blocked, it would be a whitelist of a few things they explicitly allowed.
> it's a small, curated subset of the internet augmented with surveillance & propaganda that becomes yet another tool of control.
That's not my understanding of how it works. They actively block some sites, IP addresses and ranges, and they block based on content that triggers keywords.
> Does the Jack Ma online hate mob that spontaneously appeared when he was arrested seem like free expression to you?
While I don't doubt astroturfing goes on, I don't think it's needed nearly as much as you might think. China is extremely nationalistic now, and you get people defending the government's actions for the exact same reasons you have Democrats and Republicans here defending some of the things put forth, regardless of discussion, understanding, or merit (it seemed especially egregious with Trump, but it always happens to a degree).
> Chinese citizens are allowed to communicate on the "internet" in the same way the citizens in Orwell's 1984 were allowed to watch TV on telescreens that surveilled them. Probably more useful than not having a telescreen, yet still more repressive and dystopian.
I don't think that's an accurate representation of the status quo at all. I might be wrong, but that's not how I understand the situation from what I've read and intuited from explanations I've seen. As I understand it the vast majority of sites are available, and many sites (but many major ones) are blocked and sophisticated filtering and AI is also in place to block specific content, but it's not a small curated internet by any means. I'm happy to be shown otherwise though.
And however much we might quibble over whether "small" is the appropriate word, it doesn't change the fact that the size of the internet allowed in China is far, far smaller than could be honestly called a real internet. I call it small because it's an unacceptably small fraction of important available information/communication that is just as effective, if not more, at repressing citizens. You can call it large and be no closer to arguing that this represents less of a repressive dystopia.
Beyond filtering and site blocks, China also does:
Targeted human monitoring: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/world/asia/china-surveill...
International surveillance and censorship: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/18/zoom-he...
Propaganda in search engines and social media: https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/09/28/chinese-tech-firms-fueli...
You mean communist China, or the China that existed prior to that? The time when the British had influence (control?), or prior to that? How long does this "forever" go back, and what makes you think they prior periods where repressive dystopias?
> it's not weird to assume that that's their end state
We're talking about a country that went through a violent rebellion just over seventy years ago, changing the method of government and economic system entirely in the process. And in the last few decades, they've made sweeping changes to the economic model again to the point where in some places it's extremely capitalistic where it was entirely communism based.
> (though I'm confused about what "end" you're referring to).
I guess it's decided the same way you decide who "beat" the other in not being a repressive dystopia. You can't have a winner without an end, so however people thought that meant. I don't see why my response should have any other rules than the premise it's responding to.
If USA and others tightly regulate tech, and AI advancements in China continue unchecked, then in a few decades there will be no resisting them from doing literally whatever.
It's basically the same as saying we need to match their advances in science.
Everything in the nuclear arena is existential, including countermeasures. Hence the treaty limitations on missile defense and mania for “Star Wars” (orbital anti missile systems) in the 80’s.
An advance that checkmates your rival’s nuclear capability could escalate to a preemptive conflict pretty quickly.
Democracy and the erosion of human rights are not mutually exclusive, which may be what you meant.
I don't care what the name is, but that island just a little bit off the coast of the big country known as China, should be recognized by the UN and member nations as a sovereign nation.
When 1984 and "Orwellian" are used as a catch-all for any type of oppression or even any type of propaganda, I think it does a great disservice.
I agree, but it's not hard to make a stronger case. Organizations like Google, Facebook and Twitter centrally decide Truth, and then penalize anyone who posts anything in conflict with their version. Google censors the videos of people who dare to disagree with e.g. the WHO. Facebook deboosts "vaccine hesitancy"; Twitter sabotages the engagement of people with a diverse set of "wrong" opinions, degrades the various subnetworks by silently deleting followers, annotates tweets with the Official Truth, etc.
The same thing is done here on HN, a kind of filtering that assumes its own hypothesis. Someone posts something contrary to the prevailing story? Well, if it conflicts with the WHO, it must be conspiracy theory junk. I don't recognize this site, so I'm going to flag this article. People seem sure they know what the truth is, so they feel comfortable squashing anything that conflicts with their current understanding.
There's a saying that if China's government is democratic, then they would've launched an invasion yesterday.
China has 1B people, it's a huge market, and out of the choice to keep is own brand in good standing there, he changed his tune. It was in effect a self-serving corporat4e act.
Yes, it's complicated, but they didn't 'make him'.
It's scarier when Hollywood tows the CCP party line, in addition completely ignores issues such as Tibet etc. for fear of reprisal. Other corps do it as well.
It's sad that "big brother" has lost the connotation of a citizen-operated panopticon, because I think that concern is far more immediately pressing.
> "Dr Lan Xue, who advises the Chinese Government, said facial recognition could prove "tremendously helpful" in identifying people in mass gatherings if there is a "major accident"."
People need to follow their gut and say no to things like this.
It's hard to pick out the reasonable interventions from the ones that are being promoted for surveillance purposes. It's probably best at this point to be conservative with the civil liberties we compromise on. Unfortunately, certainly language has been co-opted, and that's confusing. "Greater good" and "public health" are hard to argue against.
1) I don't want potentially naked fotos or conversations of my family online. Do you?
2) Regulations and customs change over time. Something ok 10 years ago can be damning tomorrow.
3) How do you maintain privacy of medical and lawyer conversations when anything can be released without permission?
Ironically, I had the same conversation with a lawyer ("I have nothing to hide.") who had teenage daughters. It really didn't sink in until I gave him those examples.
You always have to place absolute trust in someone, even Google. It doesn't matter what Eric Schmidt says. You're trusting dozens of companies with your privacy and your secrets every day, whether you realize it or not
Paper too, is in a sense, technology.
Your medical records may be a ream or two of paper. They don't get stored at your doctor's office, your doctor's office requests the records it needs on a daily basis. Medical couriers exist to handle emergency requests. Your data is stored in a warehouse with perhaps hundreds of employees. The threat model is different, not absent -- everybody from your doctor's receptionist to the warehouse workers have access, and can read or modify your data.
There are plenty of good things you can be doing that you'd want to keep private, or control the release of information for.
"I know what you do in the bathroom, but you still lock the door."
Tech-inept Congress-people: OK, what should the regulations be for this thing?
Also
> We don’t live in the world of Neuromancer and we never will. 99.9% of everything is mathematically invulnerable to hacking.
Seriously made me chuckle.
[1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/07/no-physical-substrate-...
[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Life-3-0-Being-Artificial-Intelligenc...
Yea, assuming someone had enough resources to create a powerful AI, they would also have enough resources for a hefty collection of unreleased 0days...
>"Critics fear the state's dominance in the area could threaten democracy"
As he implies, government will have to regulate the allowed scope of AI and will also have to do without it itself, lest it get enamored with it and do what we fear China will be doing soon to its own citizens.
We know companies will not refrain themselves out of the goodness of their own hearts. We know that from the way they mistreat user data and exploit people's psychology for commerce.
I don't have high hopes because governments will fear being left out of this race and feel they have to participate in order to not get left out of some imaginary bonanza.
Today, people have to agree with things (or at least not speak out against them) or risk losing job opportunities or being 'cancelled'.
Corporate jobs, social media, etc. Only those who have nothing to lose are able to truly speak their mind.
In the not too distant past, comedy could be free. Comedians would offend everybody just a little bit. Now, comedians are terrified to speak out. Most of the older generation of comics has said so.
Orwell is definitely possible.
Our laws, freedoms, responsibilities, civic attitudes, judiciary, journalistic institutions, governance - all of this is what establishes what we are going to be. Not 'tech'.
Tech does provide 'means not before possible' but it's our choice, and it's not really a story of AI.
So the actual message of the book was that living in England sucks, which as far as I can tell is still true.
Much more sophisticated than jail.
On the other hand, if you start something like the Black Panthers, or MLK's planned march on DC, or the Ferguson protests, then something much more final than prison may be used to get rid of you.
I can be killed if I am a journalist and dare to say anything bad against my government.
So, not exactly the same, but not too different either.
That was the undeniable shift towards hard totalitarianism.
Google and Facebook have way more on me than a telestrator ever could. It's almost God like what they can see. They've made deals to share this with the Gov to bypass constitutional limitations.
What precisely scares you so much about vaccination status being somewhat public? There's precisely zero threat to any real liberties there. And it's laughable to call this "hard totalitarianism".
As an aside, this didn't even happen, of course; we didn't "grant the play store our vaccination status". Never happened.
What if you've already developed immunity through infection? Why should you be forced into it?
This received emergency authorisation when public debate on the matter was heavily censored through government and big tech partnerships and complicit centralized media outlets.
If treatments with drugs like invermectin were given a fair consideration then it's likely these vaccines couldn't have been authorised under the emergency use protocols. More on this here: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/05/i-dont-know-of-a-big...
And of course it will be scanned and forever noted on entry every where its asked for.
To the extent that restrictions are being put in place, that is happening to save lives. I for one am glad of that.
Ivermectin, btw, which you misspelled, is not a good or even average treatment for covid-19.
https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-shoul...
You are literally denying objective reality. Google nor any other private non-health corporation has any right to that information.
The fear is: if something like it happens again, we now have the technology to make it a hundred times more oppressive.
How about we focus on Big Tech's attempts to subvert democracy before attempting to export what remains of American democracy?
Then again, it has already happened in the 2000s.
And Microsoft's president even gives us a stereotypically shoddy reading of the book
>"You know the fundamental story…was about a government who could see everything that everyone did and hear everything that everyone said all the time."
The actually interesting takeaway isn't "government does bad stuff with tech", it's that an atmosphere of reality inversion creates fertile ground for people to accept fiction over truth, even when the lie is obvious. State surveillance doesn't require AI, the Stasi already had the capacity for that 40 years ago.
Automating what we know is a dangerous policy should not be treated as lightly as you’ve put it just because you are bored of people quoting 1984 to you.
Have you considered the reason they are quoting it more and more lately might be because real life has been getting closer and closer to it?
Frankly the tossing around of 1984 has degraded discourse because its used way too much and often ignores nuance in favor of a slippery slope argument.
The ground was always fertile, the only thing that changed was that such power used to be monopolized.
The surveillance, propaganda, double think, cult of personality, eternal wars, Newspeak, etc, were all just a means to that end. That's the boot stamping on the face forever.
I think a lot of people skip over Emmanuel Goldstein's "book within a book" in 1984, but I feel like it's one of the most important parts of the entire thing, because of how it lays all of that out.
Contemporary reviewers were very convinced, and also thought that the written passages from Goldstein's in-universe book were call-outs and/or parodies of specific passages in Trotsky's "The Revolution Betrayed", I don't know enough about that book to comment on parallels, but Orwell's contemporaries did not consider the Goldstein/Trotsky reference especially subtle.
Because you couldn't trust anyone, not your friends or family. Everyone was part of a big network out to get you, so you were sort of locked in your own head.
The more realistic fear for me is ending up in a cyberpunk dystopia where the world is run by 3-4 big corporations. Which is ofc not something they like to bring up.
More similar to someone in the west offering their thoughts on Israel or Palestine. There are consequences for your ongoing standing in society, or ability to have any standing in society, no matter whether your own government is involved in those consequences or not.
I disagree. I haven't lived under Stasi but I have lived through Martial Law in Poland in 80s.
Yes, when you have picked up a phone receiver you have been greeted with pre-recorded message that "your call could be recorded", there were tanks on the streets and secret police everywhere.
But more or less you realized that state capacity is quite limited - political police could not practically analyze every recorded phone call of every single citizen. Police could have messed with life or even kill some dissidents and beat or shoot at people during street protests but they were not able to identify every single participant thereafter. In mass of protesters you were safe.
Also you could just leave the system, go into the mountains, find some job and live simple life without being bothered by the state.
This is not an option nowadays. Even democratic state has an abbility to trace every movement of every citizen. You could be traced and fined for every minor offence like traffic, your conversations, your movements are constantly recorded. You are tracked not just by the state but also by private surveilance economy.
And most important it is much harder to just leave a system. Your biometric ID, your banking apps, your credit score, your vaccination proof, your health records, your smartphone will follow you to the most remote in the country.
From what I remember (it's been a while) this was actually also the case in the book. It's not like Big Brother watched you every time, and most of the time he didn't. But he could be watching anytime. That was the whole point of it.
I lived under Stasi and yes, the means where limited, but just the threat alone was enough for most people to be cautious. If you are a target and your phone is recorded 1% of the time, you will get caught eventually, it is just a matter of time. A few relatives of mine requested their Stasi-documents and there were quite a lot of personal episodes and details in these protocols. Who visited whom when or what they talked about.
And as another commenter mentioned, Stasi had your neighbours, friends and family too. That's actually harder to leave than your banking apps. Especially if you can't even leave the country.
In a street protest, on a strike, in a church, discussion club, samizdat. That is why the movement in Poland called itself Solidarity. The police could have easily break a strike in a single factory but were helpless when all factories in a city went on solidarity strike.
Just look at Hong-Kong today..
I refuse to participate in social media because the tech is already here, and at this rate it's only a matter of time before our government or big tech itself nefariously taps into the the massive data ocean that is being collected. It only takes a handful of seemingly innocuous data points to uniquely identify a person, and from location data alone one may infer a host of private identity markers - race, religion, political affiliation, sexual preference...especially with a bit of machine learning magic.
Combining this with the political polarization we are increasingly witnessing in the US pushes us onto the precipice of a techno-authoritarian, dystopian nightmare. Imagine how much worse the Soviet Union would have been if the government had access to the breadth and depth of personal information that is merely an access key away from our own government right now. After Snowden we know that even the NSA is vacuuming up enough a massive store of potentially dangerous data.
I don't know that there's any practical solution, as I doubt the average person will care enough until it's too late. Our current economy is built on data collection. Mitigation of this threat would effectively require reengineering of society.
It seems like it means "chief legal officer".
> In the following years, Google started a contract with the Pentagon, allowing it to use some of its image recognition technologies as part of a military project.
Coincidence? I think not.
Brad Smith should focus on why the US is losing the R&D war. The reason is simple. It is increasingly difficult to do business in the United States. Hiring is more expensive and risky than it is in china. The dollar is being devalued. Brad Smith is an advocate for increased regulation, which is great for a company that can afford it(his company). It's called "Regulatory Capture".