Rod DThe American people, in my judgment, don’t have much clue about the totalitarian potential of the technology we have welcomed uncritically into our lives. From Live Not By Lies:

Kamila Bendova sits in her armchair in the Prague apartment where she and her late husband, Václav, used to hold underground seminars to build up the anti-communist dissident movement. It has been thirty years since the fall of communism, but Bendova is not about to lessen her vigilance about threats to freedom. I mention to her that tens of millions of Americans have installed in their houses so-called “smart speakers” that monitor conversations for the sake of making domestic life more convenient. Kamila visibly recoils. The appalled look on her face telegraphs a clear message: How can Americans be so gullible?

To stay free to speak the truth, she tells me, you have to create for yourself a zone of privacy that is inviolate. She reminded me that the secret police had bugged her apartment, and that she and her family had to live with the constant awareness that the government was listening to every sound they made. The idea that anybody would welcome into their home a commercial device that records conversations and transmits them to a third party is horrifying to her. No consumer convenience is worth that risk.

“Information means power,” Kamila says. “We know from our life under the totalitarian regime that if you
know something about someone, you can manipulate him or her. You can use it against them. The secret police
have evidence of everything like that. They could use it all against you. Anything!”

Kamila pointed out to me the scars along the living room wall of her Prague apartment where, after the end
of communism, she and her husband had ripped out the wires the secret police used to bug their home. It turns out that no one in the Benda family uses smartphones or emails. Too risky, they say, even today.

Some might call this paranoia. But in light of Edward Snowden’s revelations, it looks a lot more like prudence. “People think that they are safe because they haven’t said anything controversial,” says Kamila. “That is very naive.”

One of the stupidest things I ever did was spitting into a vial and sending it to one of the DNA companies. Yes, it was fun to find out the ethnic composition of my DNA. It was fun for my wife to do the same, and put to rest a family legend for her. But now not only does a company have our DNA, our foolish action compromises the genetic security of our children. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Last month, a big hack at a DNA company revealed the most intimate information of a million people — their genetic profile — to law enforcement. 

Nobody forced me to give my DNA to that company (not the hacked one, by the way). I did it because I couldn’t resist the urge to know more about where my ancestors came from, and if I was susceptible to certain genetic medical conditions. Now that I’ve released that information, it’s gone, and I can’t get it back. I wasn’t tricked into doing that, and neither was my wife. We aren’t naïfs about this stuff, either. We knew the risks, but chose to dismiss them, because we were really curious about our genetic profiles.

I also know a lot more than many people do about surveillance technology in smartphones and smart devices. I would never get a smart TV or an Alexa, but I have a smartphone. I choose to take the risk because that device has become central to the way I live. I bet I will live to regret this.

I urge you to read Ross Andersen’s big piece in The Atlantic about what the Chinese are doing with artificial intelligence and surveillance technology.Excerpts:

China already has hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras in place. Xi’s government hopes to soon achieve full video coverage of key public areas. Much of the footage collected by China’s cameras is parsed by algorithms for security threats of one kind or another. In the near future, every person who enters a public space could be identified, instantly, by AI matching them to an ocean of personal data, including their every text communication, and their body’s one-of-a-kind protein-construction schema. In time, algorithms will be able to string together data points from a broad range of sources—travel records, friends and associates, reading habits, purchases—to predict political resistance before it happens. China’s government could soon achieve an unprecedented political stranglehold on more than 1 billion people.

More:

China has recently embarked on a number of ambitious infrastructure projects abroad—megacity construction, high-speed rail networks, not to mention the country’s much-vaunted Belt and Road Initiative. But these won’t reshape history like China’s digital infrastructure, which could shift the balance of power between the individual and the state worldwide.

American policy makers from across the political spectrum are concerned about this scenario. Michael Kratsios, the former Peter Thiel acolyte whom Donald Trump picked to be the U.S. government’s chief technology officer, told me that technological leadership from democratic nations has “never been more imperative” and that “if we want to make sure that Western values are baked into the technologies of the future, we need to make sure we’re leading in those technologies.”

Despite China’s considerable strides, industry analysts expect America to retain its current AI lead for another decade at least. But this is cold comfort: China is already developing powerful new surveillance tools, and exporting them to dozens of the world’s actual and would-be autocracies. Over the next few years, those technologies will be refined and integrated into all-encompassing surveillance systems that dictators can plug and play.

The emergence of an AI-powered authoritarian bloc led by China could warp the geopolitics of this century. It could prevent billions of people, across large swaths of the globe, from ever securing any measure of political freedom.

This story is breathtaking — I mean, what it reveals about the shocking detail of what the Chinese state can and does know about its population. One more bit:

Until recently, it was difficult to imagine how China could integrate all of these data into a single surveillance system, but no longer. In 2018, a cybersecurity activist hacked into a facial-recognition system that appeared to be connected to the government and was synthesizing a surprising combination of data streams. The system was capable of detecting Uighurs by their ethnic features, and it could tell whether people’s eyes or mouth were open, whether they were smiling, whether they had a beard, and whether they were wearing sunglasses. It logged the date, time, and serial numbers—all traceable to individual users—of Wi-Fi-enabled phones that passed within its reach. It was hosted by Alibaba and made reference to City Brain, an AI-powered software platform that China’s government has tasked the company with building.

Last one, I swear:

In the decades to come, City Brain or its successor systems may even be able to read unspoken thoughts. Drones can already be controlled by helmets that sense and transmit neural signals, and researchers are now designing brain-computer interfaces that go well beyond autofill, to allow you to type just by thinking. An authoritarian state with enough processing power could force the makers of such software to feed every blip of a citizen’s neural activity into a government database. China has recently been pushing citizens to download and use a propaganda app. The government could use emotion-tracking software to monitor reactions to a political stimulus within an app. A silent, suppressed response to a meme or a clip from a Xi speech would be a meaningful data point to a precog algorithm.

Read it all. Of particular interest to my readers is how China is crushing Islam among its Uighur population. A state that can do that to Islam can do it to Christianity. This is religious and cultural genocide, and China is getting away with it, because everybody wants to be on China’s good side. A lot of money to be made there, you know. (I’m looking at the NBA, but it’s way beyond that.)

An unspoken premise of the piece — which is very, very good — is that the United States would never do to its citizens what China is doing. That is a massive error in judgment! The totalitarian instinct is well developed among America’s progressive elites, especially the younger generation. Do you honestly believe that the people who run Silicon Valley, who are in charge of top universities and major companies, would not seize that ring of power to identify and suppress racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, white supremacy, and all the other social evils that so vex the imagination of the left?

I don’t. I don’t trust them. The most militant among them hate conservatives and traditionalists more than they love classical liberal virtues. I find a technology-empowered left within the rising establishment to be a far greater threat to liberty and democracy than anything on the right, if only because the right is so weakly represented among the elite networks. Still, it’s conceivable that in the future, some would-be right-wing dictator could seize that ring of power and use it to secure his own totalitarian rule (and given the nature of AI and surveillance technology, the rule could not be merely authoritarian, but would have to be totalitarian).

Here’s what I think is the most likely scenario: the 2020 election results (whether they favor Biden or Trump) sets off a fresh and more intense round of civil unrest, as the economy sinks further into Covid-related misery. At some point in the next decade, the government and allied business and institutional leaders will convince themselves that much more intrusive monitoring of individuals is necessary to prevent violent disorder. They will convince themselves that they are doing it for Good reasons — that is, to fight white supremacy, bigotry, and the like. They will sell it the same way the Bush administration sold the Patriot Act: as necessary to protect us from Them — except “Them” will be American citizens on the religious and political right.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am. In the Atlantic piece, Ross Andersen makes a brief but plausible case for why the US needs to keep up with AI research, so it is not outstripped by authoritarian China. It makes sense, for the same reason that it made sense to build nuclear weapons to keep up with the Soviets. But in the same way, we are building for our own doom. It is quite foolish to assume that our country would not deploy technology like that against the American people. Have you read Snowden? The biggest advantage the Chinese government has over us is that it doesn’t have to contend with constitutional democracy. The second-biggest advantage it has is that it doesn’t have to be hypocritical, and pretend that it is not doing, and would not do, what it clearly and unapologetically is.