Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly developing, and numerous countries (in particular, China) are trying to implement it into their government, specifically in regards to law enforcement. China has deployed AI to work in cohesion with their security department by utilizing it to racially profile people: engineers are able to input data into AI systems, thus training it to pick up on patterns or traits. In relation to racial profiling, they will tell the machine a plethora of labeled images of the selected group.
Technology is fascinating and lucrative, yet when it is used in this fashion it points us down a dark path where authoritarian governments can better inject their rules and thoughts into society. If AI continues to be manipulated for ill causes, it can foreseeably threaten democracy and disrupt any hopes of a somewhat unified world.
Let’s take a moment and dissect what China is currently doing. A large Muslim minority group in China, the Uighurs, are being racially profiled. The bias against this group of people took root in 2009 when violent riots occurred between Uighurs and the Chinese and has drastically escalated in the preceding years. Millions of Muslims are being held in detention camps as well, in accordance with the Chinese re-education campaign that is forcing cultural assimilation, or as authorities call it, “transformation-through-education.” Using facial recognition technology that is integrated into China’s surveillance cameras, they look exclusively for Uighurs based upon their appearance and then keep records of their comings and goings. It’s virtually automated racism.
Particularly in the western region of Xinjiang, where many Uighur reside, China is also tracking DNA. Nearly 12 police departments in 16 different provinces across China have requested this AI. Similar tools are used that could automate biases based on a person’s ethnicity and skin color, too. Technology companies in China are beginning to market their products towards this. A startup called CloudWalk touts that their surveillance cameras can track “sensitive groups of people.”
Perhaps the most intimidating aspect of all is that this practices social control. For the bulk of the technological era, AI has been swallowed by democracies and greeted with intrigue and optimism. Prominent examples of AI include Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and features of Tesla and Netflix. Their softwares are capable of tracking and understanding their consumer bases and then are adapted towards their company’s marketing strategy. Who isn’t a sucker for Netflix? Yet, few have thought about the dark side of technology.
AI is as captivating as it is efficient, and it has an incredibly small margin of error and lacks emotion. The downside is that AI is expensive, therefore making it most accessible to the wealthy. As wealth oftentimes implies power, it means that these extremely valuable and influential machines are in the hands of the few. In the case of China, in the hands of the authoritarian government. AI is virtually a superhuman without a moral compass.
Without caving into melodrama, it is worth acknowledging that this can have detrimental effects on society, if not utilized for the betterment of the people. If countries continue to implement AI as China has, it will perpetuate current societal issues in regards to discrimination, racism, sexism, homophobia and virtually any “-ism” that can be thought of. This circulates and inadvertently facilitates a groupthink atmosphere and most certainly furthers the divide between the in-group and the out-group.
Technology is supposed to better society and hopefully propel us towards a more unified world. We cannot let ill-intended groups prohibit us from such a future. It’s necessary that we acknowledge and act on the strategies used in China. We mustn’t turn on technology, rather it’s the people behind it that we need to watch out for.
