The Panopticon Is Already Here

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Top Highlights

• The country is home to more than 1 billion mobile phones, all chock-full of sophisticated sensors.

• He could also export it beyond the country’s borders, entrenching the power of a whole generation of autocrats.

• iris recognition, cloud-based speech synthesis—are spun off to Chinese tech giants, AI start-ups, and, in some cases, the People’s Liberation Army.

• To visit China on sensitive business is to risk being barraged with cyberattacks and malware

• Belgian officials on a trade mission noticed that their mobile data were being intercepted by pop-up antennae outside their Beijing hotel.

• I was told to wait in a lobby monitored by cameras

• Xi has said that he wants China, by year’s end, to be competitive with the world’s AI leaders, a benchmark the country has arguably already reached. And he wants China to achieve AI supremacy by 2030.

• Xi also wants to use AI’s awesome analytical powers to push China to the cutting edge of surveillance.

• all-seeing digital system of social control, patrolled by precog algorithms that identify potential dissenters in real time.

• During China’s coronavirus outbreak, Xi’s government leaned hard on private companies in possession of sensitive personal data

• Xi’s government hopes to soon achieve full video coverage of key public areas.

• In the near future, every person who enters a public space could be identified

• China’s government could soon achieve an unprecedented political stranglehold on more than 1 billion people.

• Xi wants to use artificial intelligence to build a digital system of social control, patrolled by precog algorithms that identify dissenters in real time.

• China’s citizens were subjected to a form of risk scoring

• China’s citizens were subjected to a form of risk scoring.

• The emergence of an AI-powered authoritarian bloc led by China could warp the geopolitics of this century.

• During the initial coronavirus outbreak, Chinese social-media apps promoted hotlines where people could report those suspected of hiding symptoms.

• With AI, Xi can build history’s most oppressive authoritarian apparatus, without the manpower Mao needed to keep information about dissent flowing to a single, centralized node.

• in Xinjiang’s Muslim minority, he has found his test population