
China's Plan for World Domination in AI Isn't So Crazy - bipr0
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-14/china-s-plan-for-world-domination-in-ai-isn-t-so-crazy-after-all
======
gkanai
One of the prominent Chinese VCs, Neil Shen from Sequoia China, was on the
Economist's podcast recently talking about AI in China. When the host asked
Shen about the Chinese state's use of AI in monitoring the citizens of China,
Shen clammed up. It is an amazing bit of audio (starts around minute 8.)

[https://www.acast.com/theeconomistasks/theeconomistasks-
howd...](https://www.acast.com/theeconomistasks/theeconomistasks-
howdoyouwintheairace-)

~~~
77pt77
Your comment doesn't make it justice.

The audio is totally amazing! One of the most significant silences I've heard
in a long time.

~~~
seppin
"..no"

When a Snowden for China finally emerges, I think it's going to be far worse
than anyone imagined. And people like Shen are complicit with their silence.

~~~
yarg
People like Shen have families.

~~~
mac01021
I suspect that speaking frankly on the air about that topic would not threaten
his family so much as it would threaten his career, which likely depends to a
large extent on his relationship with a number of people in the Communist
Party.

~~~
Stanleyc23
> that topic would not threaten his family so much as it would threaten his
> career

with what data or experience do have to make this assertion?

~~~
yarg
Probably the same amount not data and experience that I have to express the
contrary.

------
lispm
> The government also revealed in 2015 that it was building a nationwide
> database that would score citizens on their trustworthiness, which in turn
> would feed into their credit ratings

The wet dream of an authoritarian government.

~~~
ldp01
Wait, isn't a credit rating already a measure of (financial) trustworthiness?

What kind of parameters can the government record which would actually make a
credit rating more reliable?

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Conformity. Those who have the right harmonious thinking are more likely to be
successful and less likely to be sent to jail for political crimes. The
government thinks they control the rules of the entire game. Also, if you have
a bad credit score, you won't be able to buy train or plane tickets in china.
It just isn't about your ability to get a loan.

~~~
arethuza
I've seen the "Social Credit System" discussed:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System)

Video describing a similar system (linked to from the wiki page):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI)

Possibly one of the scariest concepts I've seen in a while.

------
l5870uoo9y
The advantages that the article claims China has aren't unattainable for the
West, but it does – as with other political issues — require new political
movement that allows us to change our society to benefit from vast
opportunities that technology brings and to avoid the dangers. China's
ruthless pragmatism and decisiveness highlights the lack of political
leadership and visions in the West. And those political movements we have are
of little use, be it right or left.

~~~
ldp01
You can get most of the social benefits without throwing away the notion of
privacy.

In the West, all sorts of data are already available to those with legitimate
interests. Traffic data is used to optimise city planning; police can track
your phone, with a warrant; power networks read your smart meter and so on.
The key difference to the situation described in the OP is that there are
controls around it.

In terms of reaping the benefits of AI, a willingness to discard privacy isn't
as important as building the capability in data collection, warehousing,
analytics, and so on. A lackadaisical attitude to privacy such as handing
everything over to the private sector will just make it easier to commit all
sorts of crimes: identity theft, blackmail, stalking, etc. Rather than a
structural advantage to the Chinese system, it sounds more like technical
(legal?) debt that may take years to pay back once it's acknowledged that
privacy controls actually have a legitimate purpose.

~~~
lovich
Haven't we already kinda thrown away privacy? Yes the police can track your
cell phone with a warrant, but many times they've been shown to use stingrays
instead. On top of that we have the snowden revelations showing that all our
communication is tracked by the government. We appear to currently have the
worst of both worlds where the privacy is gone but it's mostly being used for
purposes that are against our interests.

------
joe_the_user
Well, on the actual topic...

China's state may have a huge store of data but it seems fairly likely they
will want to heavily restrict who gets access to this data - secrecy is the
other side of surveillance.

Similarly, AI in the West seems to have advanced a lot by having open research
sharing and a high level of intellectual integrity. China's authoritarian
state seems to often encourage poor research - not that all science is bad in
China but there's a lot of news about a lot of bad science there. Ironically,
a lack of openness can make cheating more common (a Chinese team was caught
cheating in AI challenge recently, just for example though of course these
aren't necessarily restricted to China).

Also, the Internet is a huge store of data, imagenet is pulled from the
Internet. Other huge data sources are youtube and so-on. Maybe all the data a
huge surveillance state captures would be a good source but that just seems
like one dimension in a multidimensional competition where the rest of the
dimensions might not be in favor of Chinese efforts.

------
georgeecollins
In the 1980's Japan had a "fifth generation" computer project which was a huge
commitment to AI. AI appeals as a project for governments and large
organizations (IBM) that want to direct goals from the top down. It is
difficult to do, understandable as a goal, and could in theory serve many
purposes.

~~~
bluetwo
When the US government invested a billion dollars into a project to simulate
the brain with computers this is exactly the throw-back project that crossed
my mind.

------
peter303
I have been around enough to remember a similar A.I. hype in the 1980s
involving Japan, expert systems, and logic (Prolog) supercomputers. This time
it is China, deep learning, and deep learning accelerator hardware.

The 1980s was a commercial failure, but expert systems never really went away.
One interesting project was Cyc a massive comon sense rule system, sort of
like a thesarus; now into its 4th decade. Another is IBM' Watson which is a
hybrid of rules and statistical large data.

The difference this time is that deep learning appears to work in some cases
and getting fast enough to operate in real time. One application is
environmental object classification for self driving vehicles. The deep
learning systems do as well as explicit algoritms and are easier to program.
Secondly, I saw some papers at the recent SIGGRAPH where they replace
procedural portions of graphics flows with deep learning and obtain good
results. Whether deep learning can solve every problem under the Sun as some
hypers claim is undetermined.

------
low_battery
Ah China and AI.. Just remembered this nice piece of paper: Automated
Inference on Criminality using Face Images,
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.04135v2.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.04135v2.pdf)

At best they will become an Orwellian nightmare then they currently are, World
domination? Please...

------
AndrewKemendo
I'm of the mind that China has the best shot at building AGI in the near
future for the exact reason that if they choose to, they can mandate
collection and processing of vast amounts of user data.

They also have a pretty amazing group of ML developers, even if they haven't
made the most public progress or had as much notoriety as Bengio, Russell,
Lecun et al.

One thing I find striking is that Ng left Baidu with very little discussion of
why given how much progress they had been making. It's possible that he felt
his role was to start and grow the Baidu AI enterprise and then move on.
However I would speculate that Baidu was increasingly collaborating with the
CPC and he might have not wanted to be as heavily involved in that, given that
he is more Western, being raised in London and was Hong Kongese rather than
culturally Han.

~~~
LiweiZ
I think "from mainland" or something similar is correct instead of mentioning
"culturally Han". The current culture difference was mainly formed over the
process of having different rulers for both places in the 20th century. "Han"
is a way broad notion for us Chinese. A fair amount of Chinese derived from
"Han", an ethnic group.

The reason I want to point this out is "Han" means a lot more than the current
status quo, which was transformed badly after the ruling party dominated the
main land.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
This is a good point, and is worth discriminating those groups.

------
agibsonccc
Hi, I'm actually one of the vendors involved with the healthcare project
mentioned

in the article (my cofounder is quoted)

If you are curious about anything, AMA.

More info below:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15016850](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15016850)

~~~
lightcatcher
> At the press conference, city officials shared 80 exabytes worth of heart
> ultrasound videos, according to one company that participated.

Do you know anything about this? 80 exabytes is an insane amount of storage
and is orders of magnitude larger than any dataset I'm familiar with. I
believe Common Crawl is in the petabytes range, and [0] describes training a
neural net on 300 million images (which would be 300PB if each image was 1MB,
but I suspect images are smaller). 80 exabytes is 80 million terabytes and
would cost hundreds of millions to store.

My guess is that some journalistic error occurred here, or perhaps someone
confused "80 exabytes of data are generated during heart ultrasounds" with
"we've stored 80 exabytes of heart ultrasound data".

~~~
agibsonccc
Yes we are in the center of this. We are analyzing all of that data ourselves.
The hospitals in china (each one) emits petabytes of data themselves.

There are about 1600 hospitals in all.

Real time ultrasounds get synced to the cloud via devices planed in rural
villages.

80 exabytes is not "journalistic error". We are building one of the largest AI
research centers in china to accomplish this.

~~~
ithkuil
Is that compressed or uncompressed size?

~~~
agibsonccc
Raw data. Pre processed is always smaller in practice.

------
TypedInt
> Historically, the country has been a lightweight in those regards. It’s
> suffered through a "brain drain," a flight of academics and specialists out
> of the country

Wouldn't it be crazy if a brain drain from the west to Asia arised?

~~~
seanmcdirmid
China doesn't even have a real immigration plan in place, you are more likely
to win the lottery than get permanent residency even after working there for
10 years. Simply put, they don't really want foreigners like the USA
(currently) does.

~~~
contingencies
Guangzhou now has a fast track permanent residence setup for foreigners
investing or working. Shenzhen is about to echo it. Sounds like Fuzhou has as
well. I have friends with Chinese green cards in Yunnan and Beijing, too.

Sounds like Beijing is finally taking the back foot to provincial and local
authorities on visa policy.

I've long considered myself a vanguard economic migrant of the grandparent's
brain drain. It's just impossible to have an independent career in R&D in much
of the west and have any sort of economic security, much less start multiple
businesses. My native Sydney is a particularly bad case.

~~~
tellarin
Beijing and Shanghai also have it. But even as "fast track" these are still
completely opaque and random. Also, temporary.

------
jorblumesea
I wonder how you contest the classification of "dissident" if it's generated
by a ML algo?

------
thinkfurther
Of course it's crazy. Just like the guy on HN who told me they have to build
AGI in the shadows because people just wouldn't understand, and with the other
corner of their mouth talked about how "we" should go into "oblivion"
peacefully once AGI makes us obsolete, is crazy. High-functioning, probably a
model citizen who helps the elderly across the street, but still batshit
insane on the level where push comes to shove.

> _The whole concept of alienation found its first expression in Western
> thought in the Old Testament concept of idolatry. The essence of what the
> prophets call "idolatry" is not that man worships many gods instead of only
> one. It is that the idols are the work of man's own hands -- they are
> things, and man bows down and worships things; worships that which he has
> created himself. In doing so he transforms himself into a thing. He
> transfers to the things of his creation the attributes of his own life, and
> instead of experiencing himself as the creating person, he is in touch with
> himself only by the worship of the idol. He has become estranged from his
> own life forces, from the wealth of his own potentialities, and is in touch
> with himself only in the indirect way of submission to life frozen in the
> idols. The deadness and emptiness of the idol is expressed in the Old
> Testament: "Eyes they have and they do not see, ears they have and they do
> not hear," etc. The more man transfers his own powers to the idols, the
> poorer he himself becomes, and the more dependent on the idols, so that they
> permit him to redeem a small part of what was originally his. The idols can
> be a godlike figure, the state, the church, a person, possessions. Idolatry
> changes its objects; it is by no means to be found only in those forms in
> which the idol has a so-called religious meaning. Idolatry is always the
> worship of something into which man has put his own creative powers, and to
> which he now submits, instead of experiencing himself in his creative act._

\-- Erich Fromm, who also said

> _The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these
> vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the
> errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same
> form of mental pathology does not make these people sane._

~~~
miguelrochefort
> we" should go into "oblivion" peacefully once AGI makes us obsolete

I don't see a problem with that. I have actually expressed the same idea
multiple times here on HN.

~~~
thinkfurther
It's like sneaking up on someone from behind with a knife to slit their throat
while talking about how they just "should" accept that, but since they won't,
you have to force it on them. And of course people who say different things
with different sides of their mouth don't see a problem with that. Of course
people who identify with necrophilia more than biophilia don't see a problem
with that. Blind people walking across paintings don't see a problem with
that.

~~~
yorwba
I'm not sure what you take "going into oblivion" to mean, but I interpret it
as most humans no longer reproducing or even ditching their biological forms
in favor of an upload.

Obviously eliminating humans by violent means would be immoral, but I don't
see the problem with individuals deciding not to sustain humanity as it exists
now.

~~~
thinkfurther
The fact of doing it in the shadows makes that interpretation impossible
though.

~~~
yorwba
I don't know who you are talking about, so I can only work from my own
interpretation, but there are all kinds of reasons you might want to do
something in secret, even if it does not involve killing all humans.

For example, if you want to replace all human labor by robots, a lot of people
would be against that, because they fear being unemployed. But if you don't
intend to leave those unemployed people without food and shelter, I don't see
anything wrong with still pursuing that goal.

~~~
hueving
>But if you don't intend to leave those unemployed people without food and
shelter, I don't see anything wrong with still pursuing that goal.

Taking away peoples' roles and turning them into welfare recipients is not
universally seen as a good thing. Many people get fulfillment from the work
they do because feel like they contribute to society. Taking away their job
and providing them food and shelter does not solve that problem.

~~~
yorwba
> Many people get fulfillment from the work they do because feel like they
> contribute to society.

Many people got fulfillment from playing Chess, or Go, or weaving, or tilling
a field with their own hands. Many, but fewer people, still enjoy doing these
things today, although machines are better at it than them. Others have moved
on to other ways of self-fulfillment.

If you oppose automation of activities people find fulfillment in, you should
oppose game-playing AI much more than jobs being automated away. There are
much fewer people that hate playing board games but have to do it anyway
because it's the one skill they have that will put bread on the table.

~~~
hueving
You missed the point. The fulfillment isn't from the activity, it's from being
depended on by other people to perform the activity.

An interesting hobby like Chess or Go by definition can't replace the need to
be depended on and feel like you are contributing.

------
davidreiss
Why is it that every article about china reads like a propaganda piece. "World
domination"? Was our investment in AI about "world domination" also?

It is strange how propaganda spins the narrative about the same thing so
differently.

Anyone know if chinese media/propaganda does the same thing in regards to the
west? Do they say "America or Europe's plan for world domination in AI Isn't
So Crazy?".

