Blog Post #9

 

I learned that according to the video, in 2017, China decided to catch up with the rest of the world in AI, particularly catching up with the US in 2025 and lead the world by 2030. China leads the world in E-Commerce with drones. Instead of credit cards, they use facial recognition. One man in particular was a Taiwanese scientist, entrepreneur, and businessman who went to school in Tennessee. He was the inventor of Apple’s voice recognition technology known as Kai-Fu Lee. 

Important take-aways include how China has an app called WeChat also known as Weixin. This app was very innovative and unique in that it combined the abilities of Facebook, Messenger, PayPal and much more all into one superapp. It surprised me that autonomous cars were in the late 2000s. One entrepreneur in China named Cao Xudong founded the company Momenta. I was frightened by the fact that China is constantly collecting data on its own citizens to create more and more AI. However, this innovation comes at a heavy cost. The cost is that the Chinese Government collects data on individuals and has implemented a social credit score system. They have used data to predict someone’s behavior. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dZ_lvDgevk&t=1181s

Positive aspects of more and more complex artificial intelligence and machine learning are that on one hand, technology such as facial recognition can be useful when trying to unlock your phone or computer or getting through an airport. On the other hand, there could be potential for companies to collect data and potentially invade your privacy. People in China pay for food and other items using facial recognition. As mentioned above, a challenging flaw in this innovation revealed that the technology had a dark, scary, and bone-chilling backdoor for the controversy surrounding it. An example to the video, highlighted the social credit system in China which was a useful asset that was prized by the government. This system cracked down on individuals who made mistakes like jaywalking. While it had good intentions on discouraging bad behavior, it publicly shamed offenders and ruined their lives. It also gave and denied privileges to certain citizens based on their credit score in a similar manner to the episode “Nosedive” from Netflix’s original series, Black Mirror. This has since devolved into a test of loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party. One of the pros of privacy is that your information can be more secure. One of the cons of privacy include the potential for isolation and loneliness. 

In terms of national security, the internet can be abused by the government. The Chinese Government has often taken away freedoms with the same AI programs under the guise of national security, especially when cracking down on protests. In America in the early 2000s after the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks, a law known as “The Patriot Act” was passed and the government spied on phone conversations and other activity for the sake of security. Security and identity theft is also an important issue because you could be the target of corporations that store data such as Facebook and Google as well as cyber-criminals. These issues inspired the rise of a tool known as VPN (Virtual Private Network) which keeps you in the dark from those entities. Examples include SurfShark and NordVPN.

Works Cited

PBS, Frontline. “In the Age of Ai (Full Documentary) | Frontline.” YouTube, YouTube, 2 Dec. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dZ_lvDgevk.