
Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras - rmason
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/08/business/china-surveillance-technology.html
======
telltruth
I fully expect this to keep getting advanced further. There has been no
protest whatsoever within China and even many people of Chinese origin living
in US with US citizenship seem to think this is necessary and good for the
people. I have been told that "outsiders" won't "understand" this. The bottom
line is that if people are not rebelling against current measures of social
credit, government only has incentive to keep going.

Sooner or later government would require things like TV sets with front
camera. So when a person watches TV, camera watches that person. There have
been huge progress made in emotional inference which can allow government to
measure emotional responses to what person is viewing. Imagine there is a news
of rebellian getting crushed and if you are consistently showing supportive
emotions, you can get black listed for further investigation. Cities can get
microphones at restaurants and other places to analyse what conversations are
happening and find hot spots where "trouble makers" hang out. Previously we
had only vast sensor networks. Now we can turn each sensor in to autonomous
spy that works loyally without salaries and demands nothing but cheap
electricity. Computers allows for scale when humans are being replaced. If you
want million spies scattered all around, its possible fairly cheaply now. I
would also expect lots of other countries to adopt variant of these tech,
typically under the notion of improving safety and security for general
public.

~~~
Razengan
> _I fully expect this to keep getting advanced further._

If they aren’t going to scale it back then I hope they go all the way with it.

I hope they try to automate it and feed everything about everyone to a
centralized AI.

I hope they give it more and more control including the ability to direct
military drones.

I hope it then turns on them.

Because the “smart stupid” people that implement well-intentioned malice like
mass surveillance can’t usually see far ahead (see reports of data harvesting
companies getting hacked.)

If this is the path we’re going to go down then might as well speed up
evolution and usher in a new class of intelligent life on this planet.

~~~
b_b
Seems a bit harsh to wish the suffering that this will cause on literally
billions of people to prove a point, when we can intervene now instead.

~~~
Razengan
Intervene how?

The governments and corporations of the "Free World" will only pander to
China, for “access to their market”, and individuals can't do much against a
regime that would happily mow its own citizens down with tanks and then erase
all memory of the event within a single generation. [0]

Maybe independent developers could put a notice against Chinese
authoritarianism in their apps and services when they're accessed from a
Chinese IP, to raise awareness among their public.

[0]
[http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Tiananmen+Square+1989](http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Tiananmen+Square+1989)

~~~
musage
In your case, _not egging it on_ would be a start even.

There is no bottom to this abyss. There is no limit to the number of victims,
the upper ceiling for that is 100%, or a gazillion people. There is no limit
to their innocence, and no limit to the cruelty inflicted on them. There is no
time limit, either. You say this because for you as an individual, it's easier
rationalizing that non-resistance will somehow lead to a good outcome. But if
everybody did that, it will become a trillion times worse for everybody,
"forever", than ANYTHING you could do today. Setting yourself on fire in
protest would achieve more, and hurt you less, than the outcome of global,
perfect totalitarianism -- which is an ever shrinking noose of sociopathy, not
stability.

Until you understand this you will not understand that your personal feelings
are of secondary concern when basically the world is at stake. Not the
planetoid, human society, the space where human personalities would have
developed.

"A boot stamping on a human face, forever." Don't whitewash that in your own
mind.. it involves blood, it involves children screaming in terror for what is
done to their parents, it involves sobbing elderly crushed underfoot, "and so
on". If you were face to face with just ONE such an act, could you really just
shrug it off? If you could not help, it would still sit with you, you know
that. If you were lucky, you would seek for ways to turn it into a
constructive force.

What we are lacking is a perspective for what is at stake, and for the vast
opportunities we have. As long as we use our minds more to make excuses than
develop principles and stand behind them, we have no say in what is possible.
Start with thoughts, then words. Don't be another voice calling people to fall
into a sleep that would end in a potentially never ending, ever worsening
nightmare.

~~~
Razengan
Writing all that here is all well and good but until developers and engineers
STOP caving in and bending over backwards to accommodate and _help_ China
implement that authoritarian nightmare, it's all just words that will not
change anything.

~~~
musage
I never caved in, and encourage others to resist, what more are you asking?
Anything you're actually giving yourself? You won't get to action without
thought and words, and this textbox literally doesn't allow any other input
than words, so what's the point of complaining about that?

------
wcrichton
I’m a PhD student focusing on large scale video analysis. It’s an unfortunate
fact that a lot of the applied research in this space is motivated by
surveillance, particularly in systems, eg what’s come out of Microsoft’s
efforts here [0]. A colleague who attended CVPR said most of the industry
booths were either surveillance or self driving cars.

I wish researchers would start to think more creatively about what we can do
with large video datasets and tools like face recognition. The least we can do
is try to use this technology for social good. For example, a USC/Google team
used computer vision tools to identify gender bias in modern cinema [1] (for
my own research, we’re doing a similar kind of analysis on TV news at 100x the
scale).

[0] [https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi17/technical-
sessions/...](https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi17/technical-
sessions/presentation/zhang)

[1] [https://www.google.com/about/main/gender-equality-
films/](https://www.google.com/about/main/gender-equality-films/)

~~~
ineednoprocrast
I rarely post, but I feel it necessary to chime in here.

I studied computational linguistics/natural language processing in grad
school, out of an interest in accessibility issues (I had RSI) and related
applications, and had naively neglected to look very hard about how I'd be
likely use it in a career.

Other people in my cohort went to work for the CIA. I couldn't move to the bay
area for... reasons, (this was pre-Google) and it seemed everyplace I could
find anything wanted me to have a security clearance, with all the
implications that has.

One could say I'm not mercenary enough, or that I took too many philosophy
classes, or any number of other rationalizations, but one way or another, none
of the jobs I've taken have had much need for what I studied.

I feel morally obligated to use what I know to improve the state of the world.
This has, unfortunately, led to a lot of unemployment and serious depression.

Pseudonym for obvious reasons.

~~~
chronic821
> I feel morally obligated to use what I know to improve the state of the
> world. This has, unfortunately, led to a lot of unemployment and serious
> depression.

And as you would suspect, I'm a PhD grad working in the Bay area on mas
surveillance AI. Half a million dollars a year.

I honestly don't know how to invest the money anymore. Index funds are boring
at this point.

~~~
prolikewh0a
What point was there in posting this?

~~~
arcticbull
It seems like what he's suggesting is that selling out can be quite lucrative,
and if you can deal with it, there are rewards to be had.

------
symisc_devel
We were recently approached by a contractor who works behalf the Chinese gov.
Basically, they wanted to purchase an insane number of commercial licenses of
our embedded computer vision library[1] to implement face tracking (detection
and recognition) for a custom OpenBSD fork running on a homegrown CPU
architecture with 512MB of RAM. They didn't tell more about this hardware but
impression is that is the new generation of street Cameras.

[1]: [https://github.com/symisc/sod](https://github.com/symisc/sod)

~~~
bsenftner
I write real time, video based FR. The company I work has a strict policy that
our sales, nor any partners even respond to Chinese company queries. The thing
is, regardless of what they say, you'll never get paid AND they will
reverse/rip-off your product.

------
walrus01
These tracking systems are being combined with China's "social credit score".
You think Transunion, Experian and Equifax are creepy and wrong? Spend ten
minutes researching this:

[https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=chi...](https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=china+social+credit+score&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8)

Cameras with facial recognition are the tip of the iceberg. Through
sufficiently strong government legal control, metadata such as mobile phone
GPS and tower data can be correlated with facial recognition, bank debit card
tracking, mobile payment app payments (which are HUGE in China), mandatory
data reporting from Lyft/Uber type apps, toll road transponders on private
cars, transit system stored value cards, and so forth. It's the aggregate of
the whole which paints a picture of a person's entire lifestyle.

~~~
nimrod0
The Big Three credit bureaus started exactly as a social credit system. They'd
send snoops to keep tabs on you and collect gossip from your friends.

~~~
walrus01
To the best of my knowledge, not having been alive at the time, credit cards
in the US and Canada mostly started as department store cards, from the days
when companies like Sears, Montgomery Ward, etc were dominant. You couldn't
even get a card unless you were a man, women could get a card under their
husband's name. The system evolved out of single-store charge cards to general
purpose cards.

The difference here is how it's used: If you have a "bad" social credit score
in China you can't participate in some activities, right up to buying a
domestic train or airline ticket. Possibly because your online writings have
angered somebody working for their Internet Police. Or you have expressed an
unpopular political opinion. Or you're a Uyghur.

~~~
nimrod0
If you have a "bad" US credit score you can't get an apartment, a job, a post-
paid mobile plan, or any number of things nowadays that ask for your SSN.
That's why identity theft can trash a person's life. Same with ad profiles
built around your activities and movements. You think that's not being sold
around commercially and the intelligence community hasn't obtained a copy? The
scaffolding is all there.

~~~
walrus01
Oh, it's absolutely there, and your life is definitely crippled with a bad
credit score in the US. But that's strictly _financial_. You can have an
amazing FICO score and spend 24 hours a day shitposting bernie sanders memes
on message boards, and trolling the hell of of every staff member of every
trump appointee (within legal limits of not threatening anybody). Try the
equivalent in China.

It's a _social_ credit score which gauges your compliance with societal and
police-state defined norms.

~~~
nimrod0
I understand the impulse to distinguish the two but there simply isn't as much
distinction as you perhaps would like to believe. An apartment or a job aren't
strictly financial, and while credit bureaus construct your scores out of
mainly financial transactions at the moment, they have started out as much
more, as I've mentioned, and they've always been looking for other non-
financial but correlating variables from your life activities; can't find the
link right now, but there was recently an internal whitepaper on such an
algorithm using non-financial data.

And again, the US government _does_ care about dissent and goes to great
lengths to build files on what it considers potentially subversive forces that
are essentially political dissidents. The same controlling impulses are there.
And since the scaffolding is all there, the _only_ things safeguarding against
a dystopia are, firstly, the clear-headed and astute attention against various
soft forms of social control, secondly the maintenance of decentralization as
a virtue, and lastly the robust exercise of checks and balances that are
nominally provided institutionally, and not, as your answer seems to imply,
the intricacies of how certain scores are constructed.

------
tmalsburg2
The article says there are four times as many cameras in China than in the US.
This means approximately the same number of cameras per citizen. Where is the
NYT article about the US' dystopian dreams?

~~~
briandear
It’s not even close. A false equivalence. Assuming a camera represents a unit
of surveillance, then that comparison might hold, but it’s what China actually
does with that stuff that makes the difference.

There is always this knee-jerk “What about the US?” every time there is an
article like this. If you haven’t lived in China and actually lived within
their system, it’s easy to take for granted the freedom Americans have.

I taught in China and showed a YouTube (via VPN) of the Tiananmen Sqaure
uprising to a classroom of high school senior journalism students. This was an
international school and there wasn’t a single Chinese citizen in the room — a
few days later I am called to the principal’s office because they had a visit
from MSS about potential “subversive content” being presented in a classroom.
This was about 6 years ago. Some of the teachers held clandestine bible study
on weekends — the fact that it had to be clandestine should say something.
Even the most radical Muslim in the US isn’t going to get arrested for having
a religious meeting in his home. Of course if the conversation leads to a
conspiracy to commit violence, then of course the authorities are going to be
interested. Clandestine Christians in China have never been involved in the
planning or execution of violent acts in China — yet they risk arrest by even
having an unsanctioned get-together in their homes! In the US, tens of
millions practice their religion without government molestation, even “scary”
religions, yet in China, a person even talking with their next door neighbor
about religion can get them on a list.

If a teacher in the US shows a video of the Kent State protests or plays
disparaging videos about Ronald Reagan, the FBI doesn’t show up.

I can walk into any bus station in America and buy a bus ticket to anywhere
without being denied because I may have had friends that were anti-capitalist.
But in China, you can be denied the right to travel even within China if you
are identified as a someone who has associated with anti-CCP elements. Look at
Ai Wei Wei — an artist with 24/7 surveillance because he dared make a fuss
about the Sichuan earthquake. He has been arrested, detained on multiple
occasions, denied a passport and all sort of other indignities for simply
making art. And yet in the US, we have stand up comedians that have built
hugely successful careers criticizing and even humiliating the government,
government officials and government policies. We have protest groups that burn
effigies of presidents practically in front of the White House without being
sent to a re-education camp, having their kids kicked out of school and/or
banishment to the countryside. Try that in Beijing. See what happens when an
Occupy protest happens on the streets of Shanghai.

Comparing China to the US is comparing a pigeon to a velociraptor when it
comes to this stuff.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> Clandestine Christians in China have never been involved in the planning or
> execution of violent acts in China

Firstly, the Christian element to the Taiping Rebellion[0] is one reason why
the Chinese state is wary of Christianity outside the carefully controlled
state form that is permitted. Religion can obviously contribute to social
unrest.

Secondly, house churches in China tend to promote the vision of a coming
Kingdom of God that will do away with all the rulers of the world. Anywhere
else in the world, that is viewed as an entirely mainstream aspect of
Christian doctrine. However, the Chinese Communist Party sees this as an
attack on their own authority, and so they want Christians to remain within
the state church that downplays this doctrine.

With regard to this second point, it is not just Christianity. The same
treatment applies for any other sociopolitical movement in China that
envisions a future for the country without a place for the established
Communist Party in it. It doesn’t matter if Christians are not advocating
violence. The mere fact that they even question the everlasting authority of
China’s authorities is already offensive enough to get them condemned.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion)

~~~
zshbleaker
Hi there. I was born in China and have been in here for more than two decades
and I'm pretty sure that the reason CCP consider Christian as detrimental is
absolutely nothing with Taiping Rebellion.

To understand this, you have to learn that what CCP did from 1950 to 1990 is
aiming on sandificate the whole society. They successfully destroyed all
tradition local communities under the name of "reform for communism", by
killing landlords in rural and taking away fortunes of rich men in cities.
Just like what happened to Jews in 1930s, German. People are atomic and not
self organized. They only focus on their own interest and no concept of being
a member of a local group.

However, Christians are encouraged to build local communities, and holding
regularly meetings in Church or someone's home. This is level 0 alert for CCP.

------
mindfulhack
India has almost the same population as China, and yet they don't choose to
wield an authoritative system of population control and management with all
the psychological techniques of manipulation and deception that China is.

So how is India doing - worse than China? Every country is different so can't
really be compared like that, but I am fascinated to see whether Chinese
people will come to rise up against such an abusive government and somehow
play psychological hardball in the same way, or whether the oppression will
just tire them out because ecosystems of old biology just can't compete with
the new ecosystems of machines and AI that that government is increasingly
using.

If I were writing a Sci-fi novel I'd have the AI (at the moment of
singularity) take over the selfish pig government and become the new ruler
over ALL the humans (making them equal but under it), in a delicious moment of
irony.

~~~
telltruth
You are confusing incompetence with benevolence. if India had money and AI
PhDs anywhere even half way close to China, politicians there would have
rushed to implement social credit system and it would have been called "Karma
Card". It would have promise to improve security for women getting raped and
people getting robed. I haven't studied Indian constitution myself but I have
been told that its one of the shittiest constitution out there modeled to
emulate English monarchy+parliamentary system and has zero protection on
fundamental individual freedoms explicitly specified like it does in US
constitution. There is nothing in India constitution that can prevent future
Karma Card to get implemented in India. But don't feel bad... most countries
are in same boat. Insistence for individual freedom is fairly unique to US and
may be handful of other countries at lesser extent. This is because US being
new country formed in a period, in circumstances and by group of people very
heavily influenced by Bill by Rights and extreme distaste for monarchy. Many
other former English colonies on the hand had developed huge appreciation for
the same and ended up with systems that simply emulates English political
system.

~~~
walrus01
Look at the disaster of data breaches from the Aadhar card deployment as an
example of what can go wrong. It's a heady mixture of localized corruption and
incompetence.

[https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=aad...](https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=aadhar+card+data+breach&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8)

~~~
worldexplorer
Not a single proven data breach. All claims are based on downloaded aadhar
data by third party. But they do need to step up their security game.

------
rinze
> “The whole point is that people don’t know if they’re being monitored, and
> that uncertainty makes people more obedient,” said Mr. Chorzempa, the
> Peterson Institute fellow.

Straight from 1984.

------
mncharity
One thing to start thinking about: Eye tracking is coming with AR. It enables
foveated rendering - only the tiny region[1] your fovea is pointing at gets
full resolution GPU effort. And AR is, eventually, becoming the new cell
phone. But just as cell phones were "oh, btw, now everyone will be wearing a
real-time location tracker - just like a handful of criminals and wild animals
did previously", AR is "real-time what-are-you-glancing-at/thinking-about-
second-by-second tracker". Integrating cell phone capabilities with societal
culture, policy, and law, seems to have been largely reactive, and seems to
have involved significant societal changes with limited collective reflection.
Perhaps we can do better this time, with AR and eye tracking?

[1]
[https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4dsXzM](https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4dsXzM)

------
21
This Woman Threw Ink On A Photo Of China's President On A Livestream And Now
She's Disappeared:

[https://www.buzzfeed.com/kassycho/chinese-woman-ink-xi-
jinpi...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/kassycho/chinese-woman-ink-xi-jinping-live-
stream-disappeared)

~~~
virtuabhi
Hope she is alright now.

~~~
exolymph
Oh yeah, I'm sure she's totally fine.

------
nimrod0
It should be pointed out that, with or without AI, the cultural impulses are
the same. This is an issue of authoritarianism, not of AI. If it should be
feared more universally then the fear should be the authoritarian streak
within all of us.

~~~
woodandsteel
You're absolutely correct. Things are just as bad in the US as China, and so
we should ignore what is happening in China and instead turn all our
attentions inward.

~~~
astebbin
I can’t tell if this comment is sincere or sarcastic. Poe’s Law in full
effect:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law)

~~~
woodandsteel
It's sarcastic.

------
hnzix
_Shan gao, huangdi yuan_

The mountains are no longer high, nor the emperor far away. How long until
your sesame credit is docked for walking into the wrong bookshop?

~~~
hawkice
山高，皇帝远。

For those less comfortable with atonal pinyin.

------
sharpercoder
I understand that most western countries have societal controls grown over the
past centuries. The Chinese did not, and are catching up quickly by
implementing similar controls as we have. But now, it's the digital age, and
as such they are using any available technology to implement these societal
controls. From this perspective, it's completely normal what the Chinese do.
Seen from western eyes it does look a bit scary though. We must realize
however that our society also has firm societal controls setup in many things
we do.

China is now the dominant world player, this year it has surpassed the US on
many areas (IT and military-industrial complex are the only US-dominant
areas). Much more importantly, China is full-throttle developing it's trading
strategy: The silk railway to Europe, trade dominance in Africa, footholds in
Greece, Poland and other EU countries, large export deficit to the US. It
won't be long before China will totally dominate trading in the world market.
At that point, China can set the requirements. When that happens, traders are
likely to need a WeChat account, too. No good rep? No trade.

~~~
b6
> I understand that most western countries have societal controls grown over
> the past centuries. The Chinese did not, and are catching up quickly by
> implementing similar controls as we have.

A sibling comments asks you what you mean here. I'd like to know, too. This
kind of sentiment is depressingly familiar -- it seems to me that a lot of
Chinese people like to vacillate between "China is the best", "China is just
doing what other countries are doing", and "China is a developing country" as
the situation requires, seemingly without being aware they are doing it at
all.

> China is now the dominant world player

This is true, but not in the way I think you would like it to be. If strength
is measured only in concrete production or something, then yes, China is by
far the strongest. But that's not where real strength comes from. It comes
from good ideas. China is not just behind on good ideas, it's actually
shackled. Good ideas are dangerous to the CCP, so they are actively
suppressed. The natural result is the epidemic of IP stealing that China
engages in. You can cheat on your homework and get good grades on tests for a
while, but life is not like a test in school. You cannot cheat on the test
that nature gives you. To succeed in the test of life, you need innovation and
critical thinking skills, and the CCP will not allow there to be an
environment in China conducive to the development of critical thinking skills.
Nor will it allow the kind of environment where people listen to their own
inner sense of right and wrong. People in China are not generally trying to be
righteous, they're just trying to become one of the VIPs with back door access
to the power. People in China don't trust each other, and rightfully so. Think
about the massive secret costs this is imposing on the entire country.

The CCP is a bit like cancer, and a bit like a parasite. It will continue to
drain the vitality from China as long as it is in power. Obviously, it is
trying to shut the door forever on the possibility that it will ever not be in
power. And it is stoking nationalistic notions of superiority as needed to get
the support of those it is vampiring.

So it is deeply sad to me to see someone celebrating the spread of the CCP
cancer as if it is a happy development. The rest of the world is watching in
horror as you guys happily help build your own prison. China really is #1 at
something now, leading the way as a technological/surveillance dystopia,
serving as a warning to the rest of the world why we have to prevent what is
happening in China from happening anywhere else.

~~~
sharpercoder
What happens when you request a loan? What happens when you apply for a job
that involves kids, or requires trust? These are societal controls. China did
not develop these the past centuries as much as the western world did, or they
got destroyed in communist uprisings (e.g. Mao).

My parent comment is neutral, I'm only stating some facts and conclusions. I
agree you need innovation, creativity and critical thinking to make a more
diverse society. Success however is in the eye of the beholder; it's mostly a
matter of what measure you use. Growth is not a panacea, while many western
thinking seems it is. Neither is "amount of societal order", as China seems to
think.

------
Animats
China has had broad surveillance for decades. but it was manual and village or
employer based. Each worker had a dang'an, a paper-based personnel record
which follows them from employer to employer, plus a similar record kept by
local police.

As cities grew and employees become more mobile, keeping this current and
useful started to break down. So the central authorities are modernizing their
surveillance system.

Such control predates communism in China. Something like this was in place
when China was mostly peasants, with local village officials keeping records.
This goes back at least to the Qing Dynasty, around 1750. The concept that the
government knows where everyone is and what they're doing goes way back in
China.

------
extralego
China is to 1984 as USA is to Brave New World.

------
Tenoke
The technology isn't quite there, and Chinese law enforcement clearly
exaggerates in order to maximize the current impact.

However, we are very close to the point where _everything_ could be tracked,
and recorded in a usable way - including the exact location of most citizens
at all times, discrepancies in utility bills, shopping, internet activity
(except possibly for those few with impeccable OpSec, and even that for only a
bit longer), visited places, communication with new and old contacts, etc.

Some like to think semi-romantically that we are in/near the Cyberpunk future
Sci-Fi promised. We are not - if a government truly goes all out (as the CCP
has shown willingness to do), it will at some point simply be impossible to
evade the law.

The cool greyhat who hides in the shadows, hacks government systems, and
operates outside mainstream society is a pipe dream. When all is said and
implemented escape could only come from above - another nation,
intergovernmental organization or at minimum people high up in the system.
Dissidents and revolutionaries would hardly be able to do much.

~~~
jknz
> Dissidents and revolutionaries would hardly be able to do much.

Hence the scary question: Once the technology is available (now) and complete
surveillance is implemented (soon), is there a going back?

~~~
mc32
This is a good question. I think the answer is "yes" with proviso that it
would most likely come from the top.

The CCP, is not exactly a monolith. It has factions, some get suppressed, some
come to prominence. One that saw the negative aspects as being too negative
would have to come to prominence to undo the overreach.

~~~
21
I think you are wrong. It will be hard to roll back any system which abolishes
violent crime. The people will accept it as long as it not abused that much.

~~~
myopicgoat
This is a tricky line of thinking. Once surveillance is there you can always
hide behind the “now we’re safer”, the issue is that you can always survey
more and always claim that going back would be less safe and so on and so
forth. A good example for this is airport security. As far as I’m aware it’s
quite unclear how effective all the security apparatus is yet it piled up over
the years since 9/11, full body scans are now the norm etc. The question left
to ask is: when is it too much? How much intrusion are we ready to bear for
how much marginal safety gains?

~~~
macintux
It ultimately doesn’t matter much what we’re willing to bear. Those in power
do not easily surrender tools that can keep them there.

------
mc32
This article examines A.I., policing and authoritarianism from a Western
perspective, rather than the local perspective. I think it would have served
the article's balance to get a more local and relativist view on the
intersectionality of the things they are looking to be objective about.

That said, if the technology delivers on the potential the gov't claims, I
think they will have to relax the laws or make it flexible enough such that
people and the government reach an understanding in expectations while
affording people the maximum liberty while providing a base-line of expected
behavior.

Obviously, without oversight from the people, this has the potential to turn
into a monster.

China is a huge, huge country, historically it's been difficult for the
central government to exercise its control all over its territory. This would
be the realization of that historical desire.

~~~
walrus01
you want local perspective? this is what happens when it's implemented against
a religious and ethnic minority:

[https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/02/asia/china-xinjiang-
detention...](https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/02/asia/china-xinjiang-detention-
camps-intl/index.html)

[https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/travel-0327201816200...](https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/travel-03272018162009.html)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/03/opinion/sunday/china-
surv...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/03/opinion/sunday/china-surveillance-
state-uighurs.html)

[https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/05/31/china-has-
turn...](https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/05/31/china-has-turned-
xinjiang-into-a-police-state-like-no-other)

~~~
justicezyx
Xinjiang is like Afghanistan, its not a police state, its a war zone.

You should not only pity the minority, the Han people are equally forced there
because the government needs maintain control.

These articles, do care about the people, but not all of them.

~~~
whorleater
This comment is not only hilariously unfounded, but also straight up wrong.
Where is the Helmand province equivalent in Xinjiang?

~~~
justicezyx
It's a war zone in the sense of the forces want to turn it into.

Of course, the strong arms of Chinese government stops that from happening.

------
tomxor
Classic... they called the software skynet! :P At least they have a sense of
humour.

------
xkcdefgh
democracies are sluggish, progress slowly, and also cause racial division
sometimes. But I'd still never wish any country to devolve into any other form
of governance

------
zrb
Wear a mask

~~~
hawkice
[https://zh.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/禁蒙面法](https://zh.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/禁蒙面法)

It doesn't say so on the English wikipedia page, but in some areas known for
violence and particularly extreme Chinese crackdowns, wearing a mask in public
is banned.

------
dalbasal
_" China is reversing the commonly held vision of technology as a great
democratizer"_

I think it's near impossible to broach the topic without bringing in worldview
& speculation, but..

Lets take a look at why that notion of democratizing technology existed in the
first place. I think there are a few dispirate ones.

First, there is the adoption curve many recent "technologies." Penicilin &
uimunization, paved roads & electricity... These technologies took generations
before they reached 50% of the population, and are only now approaching the
"last mile" phase.

Mobile phones, celular internet, facebook, google, digital money... these
reached third world farmers fast, anywehre from a a couple of decades to a
couple of years. That is democracratic in the "everyone gets it." sense

Another definiton is a sort of capitalist/liberal one. The internet was a
democratic latform in terms of economic opportunity. Internet age companies
were mostly newly founded ones. The wins did not go to pre-existing companies,
leveraging their preexisting size and power. Rather, tiny newcomers managed to
compete and win against large established companies. The proverbial "guys in
the basement" taking on billion $ companies. This wil seem democratic, to
those with a certain worldview.

It's hard to say this has stopped, but it is certainly different. The new
generation of internet companeis are the current oligopolies, even
oligarchies. Cellular internet is reaching people without mains electricity,
but often the internet consists of just FB, who have basically purchased an
exclusive monopoly.

Last (and probably most important) is freedom of information, citizen
journalisand other related aspects of democracy that communication technology
advanced. If you want to criticise a regime, no one can stop you.

These democratizing features land squarely in the middle of the liberal
worldview, and excite all sorts of grand expectations. Freedom of thought,
speech, press, conscience, association.... The rights of man and the basis of
a free society & liberal democracy, free market or otherwise.

I think liberals (including me) believed that a free infromation would be a
blow to despotry. This, I think, has proved false. These freedoms (in
practice, but not theory) don't seem to lead to anything in particular.

Disilussionment is ongoing. We have twitter mobs, clickbait, fake news, paid
trolls and info bubbles... Facebook controls the media people get, and the
data that makes this useful. Centralisation is worse than before. Exclusive
access to data is becoming a force to be reckoned with, and all the power
naturally flows to the largest companies.

Despots needed to adapt, but those who do end up even more powerful than
before. Take Russia, China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia as examples. It's true that
they can't control information anymore. If you want to read an article
painting the leader in bad light, you can. But, they can _influence_ what most
people hear. They can censor sites, and 90% of people won't bother finding
workarounds. They can troll opposition views, and make any issue seem like an
open debate.

The game is no longer about locking out competing politics. It's about winning
public opinion in an uneven debate, with tools at your disposal that the
opposition does not have. Instead of a "tank vs knife" dynamic with their
opposition, they've had to settle on a "gun vs knife" dynamic. It keeps them
sharp, but doesn't really threaten regime stability.

My conclusion is the old banal cliche. Regardless of the starting point,
technology is what people do with it. A technology is neither despotic or
democratic.

------
poster123
According to the article, violent criminals, such as a "fugitive murder
suspect", have been apprehended using facial recognition technology. It is not
clearly dystopian to me to have a society where criminals are always caught --
it depends on whether the definition of "criminal" is good or if it just means
someone who criticizes the government.

------
zavi
Why dystopian? Seems subjective.

~~~
sonnyblarney
A system in which some authoritarian power literally watches your every move
and subjects you to analysis, legal implications, social standing, and wherein
citizens have no power or recourse to alter that system ... is fairly
objectively 'dystopian'.

If this were strictly limited to 'matching terrorists and murderers faces out
in public' \- then I think some kind of argument could be made. But this goes
way, way beyond that.

You know what would be better? A system where people are raised to be
conscientious, responsible and fair - so you don't need to monitor them all
day and night. It works pretty well in many places.

Even if you put all the privacy and social implications aside - I really don't
think anyone in my neighbourhood would think that all of this would actually
create a more peaceful neighbourhood or create better social outcomes at all.
So it's like 'all the dystopian stuff' without really a lot of upside.

~~~
nimrod0
Everybody is somebody's terrorist. The US doesn't have a great track record on
this. I mean MLK was tracked by the FBI.

~~~
sonnyblarney
"Everybody is somebody's terrorist."

Not at all.

