China dominates the global AI network, and the authoritarian government is its biggest user
Studies show that China is exporting huge amounts of artificial information technology (AI) and reducing its contributions to other high-tech fields, said Harvard economics professor David Yang.
Yang also showed that autocratic governments around the world are particularly interested in artificial intelligence.
“Artificial intelligence is startlingly the only sector of the 16 high-tech sectors with a disproportionately higher number of buyers who are weak democracies and autocracies.”
“Autocratic governments would like to be able to predict the whereabouts, thoughts and behavior of citizens,” Yang said, adding, “And AI is basically a predictive technology.”
This creates an alignment of purpose between artificial intelligence technology and autocratic rulers, he argued, the Harvard Gazette reported.
Because AI is highly dependent on data, and autocratic regimes are known to collect massive amounts of it, this benefits companies with Chinese government contracts that can turn around and use government data to support commercial projects, he added.
China is a major player in the global landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) research, development and decision-making. Its talent pool, growing technological prowess and innovation, and national investment in science and technology have made it a leader in artificial intelligence, the Brookings research paper said.
For more than two decades, China has become deeply enmeshed in the international network of artificial intelligence research and development (R&D), co-authoring papers with foreign colleagues, hosting American corporate AI labs, and helping to expand the frontiers of global AI research. For most of that period, these connections and their consequences remained largely unexplored in the world of politics. Instead, the nature of these connections was dictated by the researchers, universities and companies that created them.
But over the past five years, these ties between China and global research and development networks have increasingly come under scrutiny from governments, universities, businesses and civil society, the paper said.
Four factors worked together to drive this reassessment, including the growing potential of AI itself and its implications for both economic competitiveness and national security; China’s unethical use of artificial intelligence, including the use of artificial intelligence tools for mass surveillance of its citizens, especially the Uyghur ethnic group in Xinjiang, but increasingly; China’s growth in AI capabilities and ambitions, making it a real competitor to the US in the field; and the policies by which the Chinese state strengthened these capabilities, including state-directed investment and illegal transfers of information from abroad, the paper by Cameron F Kerry, Joshua P Meltzer and Matt Sheehan noted.
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