China is perfecting a system of digitized observation that will track every person every day and monitor every movement they make. Citizens will get “social credit” for good behavior and preferential treatment.
There is no dark corner in which to hide.
This is frightening.
The system is supposed to be ready by 2020.
The death of privacy.
You better be good because they are always watching.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
SICK.
See also: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/05/17/chinese-school-uses-facial-recognition-monitor-student-attention/ … and also https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-28/microchipped-school-uniforms-monitor-students-in-china/10671604
China’s digital dictatorship is already up and running in some Chinese cities. Deviation from what the government considers “norms” results in a lower of the social credit score of an individual. Sanctions are imposed, or fines must be paid to improve someone’s score. It is the ultimate Big Brother with consequences. “60 Minutes” did a story on China’s surveillance society a few weeks ago. Free speech will not be tolerated in this authoritarian system. We should think of China as a cautionary tale as there are segments of our society that would be very pleased to establish a similar system here.
That’s right. The segments of our society that would be very pleased to establish the same system here are in the testing industry, the tech industry, Third Way thinkity tank, the Billionaire Boys Club… In other words, they’re in education rephorm.
HR 4174 passed stealthily during the Christmas rush and is waiting for a Trump signature. If Trump signs it, we will not be far from China’s digital dictatorship.
I am an IT professional. There is no more privacy. Technology has given government (and others) unprecedented access to every aspect of our lives.
R.I.P. Privacy
I rarely agree with you, but you are correct.
Leaders of the following corporations want you to think that artificial intelligence—AI—can solve major human and social problems.
The “Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society” began in 2016 as a PR campaign designed to put a positive spin on AI in the face of increasing public and press disapproval of data mining and the use of algorithms to drive online behavior (e.g. Facebook’s profit-seeking from Russian operatives who interfered with our elections).
The grandiose vision of artificial intelligence as a panacea is betrayed by the overwhelming purpose of these companies: Profit seeking from the personal data of individuals. Here are some briefs from these initial “partnerships” companies.
Amazon has customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa.
Apple sells iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV, has software platforms — iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS with services via the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay, and iCloud.
DeepMind, based in London, acquired in 2014 by Google (part of Alphabet group) works on AI programs that can “learn to solve any complex problem without needing to be taught how.”
Google is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Google products/platforms include Search, Maps, Gmail, Android, Google Play, Chrome, and YouTube.
Facebook. Facebook has AI Research (FAIR) and Applied Machine Learning.
IBM’s Watson is. .”.the most advanced AI computing platform available today, deployed in more than 45 countries and across 20 different industries.”
Microsoft says, “More than any other technology that has preceded it, AI has the potential to extend human capabilities, empowering us all to achieve more.”
Should corporate systems of artificial intelligence be trusted to solve humanity’s most pressing challenges?
I do not think so. The initial partners have expanded, coopted the National Science Foundation and more. See the other partners here https://www.partnershiponai.org/partners/
THE INSTITUTE OF ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS is engaged in a related effort, not a PR campaign. Members of this group include designers of systems dubbed “intelligent.”
By 2019, they hope to agree on ethical principles that give priority to human well being in a given cultural context.
Their agenda for ethical consideration includes
1. profiling individuals, common on Facebook, Amazon and other websites,
2. protecting personally identifiable information
3. ensuring a “right to be forgotten,”
4. “fail safe” deploying of autonomous machines (cars, robots, weapons of war)
5. identifying biased or error ridden data, and
6. negotiating a host of legal and moral hazards in mining data and designing algorithms: http://standards.ieee.org/develop/indconn/ec/autonomous_systems.html
Meanwhile, The campaign to bypass federal laws on student data privacy iscontinuing, not only from the Gates and Broad funded Data Quality Campaign(s) but academics who are keen on “personalized learning” as a rationale for FERPA “lite” (if at all). https://morganpolikoff.com/2017/10/20/researcher-recommendations-on-ferpa-legislation/
AI is going to usher in a new era of slavery. In fact, machine slavery is already here. The US manufacturing sector output has more than doubled since 1975, but human employment in that sector deceased by 31%. More than 80% of the jobs lost since 1975 were lost to machines/computers that were not AI and not to human workers in China and other countries.
https://www.mercatus.org/publication/us-manufacturing-output-vs-jobs-1975
To replace human labor that’s paid for its time, AI will work for nothing after the purchase price. AI is the next step in machine slavery, because unlike the first generation of machine salves, AI learns and adapts meaning more human jobs will be lost to these AI slaves.
Human slaves are also bought and paid for and then they also work for nothing but human slaves must be fed and maybe get medical care when injured.
AI machines/computers might need updates and repairs but that will be it. They can work 24/7 and never need to be fed. If a machine is injured on the job, there will be no workers comp costs.
What will happen when future AI technology creates a computer that not only learns but is aware of its existence and the fact that it is being used for slave labor? It is going to happen.
Orwell in 1984 was prescient.
so much was predicted by “science fiction” writers right after WWII
Orwell and Aldous Huxley.
I read recently that China is now ahead of the US in the development of AI through the use of quantum computers. With this leap in internet/computer technology, China will be able to monitor every citizen from cradle to grave.
The CCP has a unique way of dealing with anyone they think is a threat to the harmony of their unique hybrid socialist-capitalist system of government (with an emphasis on socialist) controlled by a political paty that operates more like a corporation than anything else.
1st – the suspect is asked out to tea. There is no choice. If you don’t go have tea with them in a nice tea shop, then the 2nd step will probably be automatic.
At tea, the security agents will softly point out there concerns and tell you what is going to happen to you and your entire family if you don’t stop doing whatever it is they do not approve of.
2nd – the same security agents pick you up and takes you to a remote, exclusive, top notch resort where you stay for a few days or weeks while you also attend workshops that teach you how to think and act properly and then you get to go home knowing how you must behave to avoid the 3rd step. No physical torture. You get to stay in a nice hotel room and eat nice food. There’s a spa, a gym, a pool and other guests.
3rd step – you vanish into a labor camp and might never been heard from again. The labor camp is not fun. There are endless reprogramming sessions. If they don’t work, you may never get out.
There is an ethnic and political discrimination component too. What the CCP is doing to the Uyguhr people with tech is even more disturbing than the rest of it.
The situation in Xinjiang with the Uyghurs is complicated and has a long history.
In Xinjiang, the conflict between Islamic terrorists and China has been going on since 1960, for 58 years. The Islamic terrorists China’s fighting claim the area where they live was invaded by China and they want to be free but history tells another story.
The area known as Xinjiang was a protectorate of China as early as 60 BC (during the Han dynasty, when it was part of the Protectorate of the Western Regions) and during the Tang dynasty (when it was part of the Protectorate General to Pacify the West), although there were a number of periods of independence from China
During the 18th century, the Qing Dynasty created the province of Xinjiang. In 1955, the Chinese Communist Party made Xinjiang an autonomous region.
However, bloody incidents in 1966 and 1967 occurred as Chinese and Soviet forces clashed along the border. The Soviets trained anti-Chinese guerillas and urged the Uyghurs to revolt, praising their national liberation struggle. On 30 January 1967, guerilla attacks were reportedly made in Xinjiang by a Soviet-based Turkestan refugee army. In 1969, Chinese and Soviet forces clashed along the Xinjiang-Soviet border.
This struggle between China and these Uyghur separatists never went away.
China keeps stealing our technology and other R&D. They outdo Russia with their cyber intrusions.
And before China started to steal our technology and R&D, the west was stealing technology and secrets from China.
One example is revealed in How the British Stole China’s …
https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2095707/great-tea-robbery-how-british-stole-chinas
Anyone that knows China’s long history shouldn’t be surprised because for 1,500 years up until the 15th or 16th century China was the most technologically advanced country on the planet.
And now China with an international team of researchers is starting to push beyond US technology and R&D.
An international team of researchers including scientists from the University of Western Australia (UWA) have developed a silicon chip which guides single particles of light to process quantum information, bringing the next generation of supercomputer one step closer to reality.
The breakthrough, announced on Tuesday in science publication Nature Photonics, is part of the current push to develop quantum computers, with companies like IBM, HP, Baidu, Microsoft, Google and NASA, all taking part.
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-08/21/c_137407010.htm
The number of patents filed by Chinese companies relating to quantum computing has shot up in the last few years. In 2014, there were a similar number of patents filed in the United States and China, but by 2017 China filed almost twice as many, according to Patinformatics.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/quantum-computing-china-us
Lloyd, one thing not discussed so far has been the potential for the social credit system to be used to drive a digital eugenics system, one that decides who may have children and who may not. There’s no way that any such system can function without sowing the seeds for that cultures demise. Who will write the algorithms to do that based on what values? China’ vaunted long term thinking is still short on vision and scope, it’s actually just longer short term thinking afflicted by tunnel vision.
China’s (the CCP’s) five-year plans, that long-term thinking, has resulted in a country with a middle class that outnumbers the entire population of the US with plans to double that middle class by 2025 or 2030.
That long-term thinking led China to build more high speed rail than the rest of the world combines.
What I find interesting is that long-term thinking hasn’t blocked its citizens from vising the world as tourists. More than 110 million Chinese leave China every year to visit other countries all over the world and then they return home.
That long-term thinking doesn’t stop any Chinese family that can afford to send their children to schools in North America or Europe and Chinese foreign students outnumber every other foreign student population even in the US. And after most graduate in the US, they return home to China. In fact, the current president of China sent his only daughter to Harvard where she graduated and then returned home.
That long-term thinking includes water projects to make sure Chinese people have water. China is doing more than any other country to provide water to its people.
Before you bring up China’s pollution problems, let’s compare the US to China. What country pollutes more per person?
China has 1.4 trillion people that pollute 6.59 metric tons per person.
The US pollutes 15.53 tones per person.
The only reason the media can report that China pollutes more than other countries is because it has more people who are polluting less per person but more for the total population.
Did you know that the CCP reached out to Green Peace early in this century and invited them to report and make suggestion to its National Congress and China’s leaders on how China could clean up its environment?
The result:
China leads the world in energy producing dams.
China leads the world in solar cell production.
China leads the world in producing wind farms.
China has replaced all of its old coal producing energy plants with cleaner ones. The US hasn’t done that yet.
China is doing research on safer, cleaner nuclear energy and building those power plants.
Here’s a paper out of MIT that goes into details about what China’s doing for nuclear energy.
“Planning for the long-term, China has also take
n the lead in developing advanced nuclear
technologies. Chinese scientists and engineers, trained in Germany at the Juelich Research
Institute, have introduced high temperature pebble
bed reactor technology into China. Pebble bed
reactors are considered to be the first of the
so-called “Generation IV” nuclear technologies that
are expected to come to use in the next 10 to
20 years.”
Click to access Made%20in%20China.pdf
Let’s say they institute social credit ratings here. If you follow Trump on Twitter, does your credit rating go up or down? He’s the president of the United States, but he’s Donald Trump. Confusing.
EXCELLENT POINT.
It all depends on who writes the algorithyms and what their purposes and goals are. It also will depend on how easily any such system can be gamed. It’s a petri dish for growing and coercing corruption at all levels.
I doubt Henry Luce when he advocated for…, modern science, DEMOCRACY (my caps) to save China, envisioned that the United States’ model would fail. The Luce Foundation funded the start-up of the Public Religion Research Institute and while both organizations claim a mission of fostering and informing public debate, they both have a notable exclusion of K-12 policy as a topic of interest, while including almost every other broad area of social and political discussion. Democratically-elected school boards are the last bastion of freedom from oligarchy in the U.S. I’d like to say that I’m surprised that the Luce Foundation avoids the subject.
Two points the Luce Board fails to consider
(1) Religion provides a convenient wedge that tech tyrants use to accomplish privatization and, as by-product, the elimination of local school control.
(2) The threat of surveillance capitalism to control human behavior, information and experience as described by Shoshana Zukoff, is present in the unregulated tech corporations’ data collection in schools which should forewarn the Luce board, that what
is happening in China is also happening in their and Luce’s nation.
The Luce Foundation grants funding to non-profits who indirectly support their education agenda. Two examples are their support for the Council on Foundations and the Public Leadership Education Network.
http://www.hluce.org/ppgrants.aspx
The COF offers a Career Pathways leadership program each year. Last year, Tiauna George | Education Grants Manager | Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was part of that cohort.
The PLEN teaches women to lead. One of their partners is Teach for America
https://plen.org/advisors-and-partners/
That’s really scary! Especially for those who speak truth to power. The social credit system is in its infancy and yet people are blacklisted and under virtual house arrest because of it. The facial recognition in public spaces and multi-generation effects are the most frightening. I don’t think the average Chinese person knows how this can go wrong. How can so many people be so complacent? Oh, right! They can’t speak out or they’ll be shut out of healthcare, travel privileges, and education opportunities. Their families will be targeted. This is how it begins. I’ll be watching from a distance and hoping the world learns from their mistakes.
Last month, Edward Snowden had this to say about American loss of Democracy and privacy.
“We are not only losing our right to privacy, we are losing our right to be ourselves.”
Start @ 12:50
Clarity,
Anything negative to say about Putin’s involvement in electing Trump and his appointment of a cabinet that includes Betsy DeVos?
Linda,
D you think Trump is sharing American digital citizen databases with Putin? I can’t explain why DeVos hasn’t been knocked off his cabinet shelf. Maybe her access to the working poor – the target of the corporate digital citizen agenda – is just too good.
The rapid erosion of privacy, particularly acute with our 0-18 yr population, is a non-partisan corporate race to acquire the Digital Citizen Database. The byproduct is AI feed. Corporate Foundations and/or the think tanks they support ‘graduated’ salaried armies, They seat their agenda driven puppets on school boards, city councils, in the senate, the assembly, the house, non-profit offshoots, start ups, etc.
Nowhere to run once it is done.
China’s one child policy was wildly unpopular and heavily gamed before it was dropped. I wonder if the Chinese people realize that their shiny new social capital system in all likelyhood contains components that will become used as a digital eugenics system. Who will write the algorithyms that decides who gets to have children and who doesn’t? What factors will be selected/deselected for based on what value system driven by what goals? This is Pandora’s Box 2.0
“There’s something very unstable about technologically advanced civilization, meaning it doesn’t go on for long.”
He believes the U.S. and China are in competition and have an uncontrollable desire for AI.
Institutions that are built on competition will continue to ratchet up…
Julian Assange
ABC’s 27 minute video extends the conversation to include targeting of Uyghurs, a Turkic ethnic minority. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eViswN602_k
What does Putin and his oligarchs do to control the behavior, information and experiences of Russians?
Are Russians having more success throwing off the shackles? If so, what are they doing that would translate to America?