27 ms·

China's Plan for World Domination in AI Isn't So Crazy

144 points by bipr0 9y ago

lispm 9y ago
> The government also revealed in 2015 that it was building a nationwide database that would score citizens on their trustworthiness, which in turn would feed into their credit ratings The wet dream of an authoritarian government.
- ldp01 9y ago
  Wait, isn't a credit rating already a measure of (financial) trustworthiness? What kind of parameters can the government record which would actually make a credit rating more reliable?
  - lispm 9y ago
    They factor in whether you are a rule obeying good citizem. The result is also not only used to put you at financial disadvantage, they use it everywhere there is a queue to put those good citizens into the front of the queue.
    - e4r5t6 9y ago
      Is Liu Xiaobo regarded as rule obeying good citizen?
      - MagnumOpus 9y ago
        Obviously not, not harmonious enough. But social rating is not for actual opposition activists who will be jailed/tortured/disappeared even without it - it is for the tens of millions of common citizens who might sympathise with them and for whom a credit rating penalty might make them think twice about expressing their support or sympathy or outrage about the injustice.
  - Inconel 9y ago
    I'm fairly certain I read that this system will also allow citizens to assign trustworthiness scores to friends and acquaintances.
    - provost 9y ago
      > Credit scoring companies in the US and China are already experimenting with data from social media profiles. Counting how many times someone says “wasted” in their Facebook status can help to predict whether they will repay their debts on time, according to a trial by US credit analyst FICO. Source: https://www.ft.com/content/e8ccd7b8-6459-11e6-a08a-c7ac04ef00aa https://www.ft.com/content/e8ccd7b8-6459-11e6-a08a-c7ac04ef0... [FT might be paywalled, but I was able to reach it via Google for free]
      - Inconel 9y ago
        That's pretty unsettling. I wonder if I'm going to find myself in a similar situation regarding social networking as I found myself in regarding credit cards a number of years ago. For the longest time I didn't have any credit cards since the idea of debt really scared me but I realized I was only hurting myself by not building a credit history. I signed up for a number of cards over the years and put small recurring charges on them that I always pay off in full. Similarly, I don't really participate in much social media, HN is the exception, and I have no FB account, but I wonder if at some point my lack of public facing social media will negatively impact other areas of my life like borrowing, employment, or housing. Maybe someone enterprising can start a service that automatically posts a bunch of innocuous stuff to a FB profile so I don't have to bother wasting my time with it.
        che_shirecat 9y ago
        The sort of profiling the parent comment was talking about doesn't work the other way around - it'd be idiotic to punish someone's credit score for not having a social media account or having it set to private/friends-only/un-crawlable. The lack of a social media account might even be a signal of better creditworthiness
        9y ago
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    Conformity. Those who have the right harmonious thinking are more likely to be successful and less likely to be sent to jail for political crimes. The government thinks they control the rules of the entire game. Also, if you have a bad credit score, you won't be able to buy train or plane tickets in china. It just isn't about your ability to get a loan.
    - arethuza 9y ago
      I've seen the "Social Credit System" discussed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System Video describing a similar system (linked to from the wiki page): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI Possibly one of the scariest concepts I've seen in a while.
    - Shivetya 9y ago
      move to digital currency and they; or any other government for that matter; prevent you directly from providing or consuming goods and services. So combine both elements, a government controlled "score" plus digital currency and they will control the game. Then it comes down to, can barter even exist.
  - ThomPete 9y ago
    Credit rating are ironically based on taking up debt to show that you can deal with debt. There are other ways to think about credit worthiness. As an example your checking and savings account can be used to show how you actually do each month, you can look at social connections to see who my friends are and if you have something like Google Wallet or Square Cash or Venmo you can also look at how good people are at paying each other back. So plenty of things to look at that aren't being recorded right now.
  - zhte415 9y ago
    Credit ratings are given by credit ratings agencies. Currently, credit ratings agencies give ratings to organisations based on the fees of those same organisations asking them to rate them. This creates a conflict of interest. A large conflict of interest. Like most FinTech, and change is more a question of law and regulation than it is technology 'disrupting' an opportunity. In finance, laws or regulations change and Fintech tends to be the fastest to react. It is regulators who drive where Fintech goes (not in all cases, but in I'd argue most), however.
  - candiodari 9y ago
    It's not about making credit rating more reliable, rather the opposite. It's about sabotaging the people they want sabotaged. Wrong ethnic group perhaps, or wrote a dissenting article ? No more loans or even anything but cash for you !
- ThomPete 9y ago
  It's actually explored in an episode of Black Mirror called Nosedive. Pretty convincing and scary.
  - dave_sullivan 9y ago
    I thought Nosedive was more of a "Look what we might turn into" thing. The government didn't have much to do with it (except dragging her away when she has a knife). It was a defacto dystopia. For instance, that truck driver who ditches the system isn't getting tortured as a dissident by the gov. China's vision is much worse. * Everybody is measured by a score between 350 and 950, which is linked to their national identity card. While currently supposedly voluntary, the government has announced that it will be mandatory by 2020. * The system is run by two companies, Alibaba and Tencent, which run all the social networks in China and therefore have access to a vast amount of data about people’s social ties and activities and what they say. * In addition to measuring your ability to pay, as in the United States, the scores serve as a measure of political compliance. Among the things that will hurt a citizen’s score are posting political opinions without prior permission, or posting information that the regime does not like, such as about the Tienanmen Square massacre that the government carried out to hold on to power, or the Shanghai stock market collapse. * It will hurt your score not only if you do these things, but if any of your friends do them. Imagine the social pressure against disobedience or dissent that this will create. Anybody can check anyone else’s score online. Among other things, this lets people find out which of their friends may be hurting their scores. * Also used to calculate scores is information about hobbies, lifestyle, and shopping. Buying certain goods will improve your score, while others (such as video games) will lower it. * Those with higher scores are rewarded with concrete benefits. Those who reach 700, for example, get easy access to a Singapore travel permit, while those who hit 750 get an even more valued visa. * Sadly, many Chinese appear to be embracing the score as a measure of social worth, with almost 100,000 people bragging about their scores on the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. From http://boingboing.net/2015/10/06/reputation-economy-dystopia-c.html http://boingboing.net/2015/10/06/reputation-economy-dystopia...
    - taneq 9y ago
      Let me guess, scores above 950 are reserved for heads of state, and anyone with a score below 350 is executed?
- 77pt77 9y ago
  Last time I spoke to a native Chinese about that he said he was not worried at all and said that the worries in the west were tremendously overblown.
  - Talyen42 9y ago
    he sounds like someone with a high Trustworthy Score(tm)!
    - 77pt77 9y ago
      Well, he was studying in the West and was travelling alone at that time. Surely that's a bit "deviant".
      - dmoy 9y ago
        No that's about par for the course for the rich ruling generation's kids. Honestly though it's more likely he's apolitical and doesn't actually care or know... I'd say like 80% of young Chinese I've met are mostly apolitical or at least won't let on at all what they think (both in China and in the US).
TypedInt 9y ago
> Historically, the country has been a lightweight in those regards. It’s suffered through a "brain drain," a flight of academics and specialists out of the country Wouldn't it be crazy if a brain drain from the west to Asia arised?
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  China doesn't even have a real immigration plan in place, you are more likely to win the lottery than get permanent residency even after working there for 10 years. Simply put, they don't really want foreigners like the USA (currently) does.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - agibsonccc 9y ago
    Hi, Just want to give a different perspective here. It's definitely hard (japan was as well till recently) It's possible to get it on the right track. Tech jobs (especially depending on the province) provide incentives for a better path to something like this. I'm directly involved with the fuzhou government deal. My cofounder chris is quoted in the article. We are actually getting incentives and visas for foreign talent to move to southern china. We have a proper incorporation in china and everything setup. Their goal is to build a large scale tech hub. More of the news in mandarin from the launch: http://www.mnw.cn/news/fz/1759144.html http://www.mnw.cn/news/fz/1759144.html http://fz.fjsen.com/2017-06/27/content_19717392.htm http://fz.fjsen.com/2017-06/27/content_19717392.htm http://news.fznews.com.cn/shehui/20170627/5951957fec4fc.shtml http://news.fznews.com.cn/shehui/20170627/5951957fec4fc.shtm... http://www.chinadevelopment.com.cn/news/cy/2017/06/1154087.shtml http://www.chinadevelopment.com.cn/news/cy/2017/06/1154087.s... http://www.fjcl.gov.cn/xzdt/1709724.jhtml http://www.fjcl.gov.cn/xzdt/1709724.jhtml http://health.gmw.cn/2017-06/26/content_24892813.htm http://health.gmw.cn/2017-06/26/content_24892813.htm http://fj.people.com.cn/GB/n2/2017/0627/c181466-30385585.html http://fj.people.com.cn/GB/n2/2017/0627/c181466-30385585.htm... http://fj.people.com.cn/BIG5/n2/2017/0627/c181466-30385585.html http://fj.people.com.cn/BIG5/n2/2017/0627/c181466-30385585.h... http://news.fznews.com.cn/shehui/20170627/5951ab08e5189.shtml http://news.fznews.com.cn/shehui/20170627/5951ab08e5189.shtm... http://fz.fjsen.com/2017-06/27/content_19716514.htm http://fz.fjsen.com/2017-06/27/content_19716514.htm This actually made a large scale splash in china. We will be the primary AI vendor for the implementation. We are helping them build their own on prem infrastructure. We are hiring in china for those interested in learning more! Email in profile. Edit: updated to clarify about perm residency.
agibsonccc 9y ago
Hi, I'm actually one of the vendors involved with the healthcare project mentioned in the article (my cofounder is quoted) If you are curious about anything, AMA. More info below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15016850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15016850
- Eridrus 9y ago
  Is there any way for Western companies to get access to these sorts of datasets, or are they being treated as a strategic asset only to be shared with local companies?
  - agibsonccc 9y ago
    Through partnerships. We have access to this kind of data due to our strategic relationship with CEC Data (the company that owns the data). We also have an incorporated chinese entity in fuzhou itself which handles this. We have people based in beijing analyzing the data. It's all on premise.
- lightcatcher 9y ago
  > At the press conference, city officials shared 80 exabytes worth of heart ultrasound videos, according to one company that participated. Do you know anything about this? 80 exabytes is an insane amount of storage and is orders of magnitude larger than any dataset I'm familiar with. I believe Common Crawl is in the petabytes range, and [0] describes training a neural net on 300 million images (which would be 300PB if each image was 1MB, but I suspect images are smaller). 80 exabytes is 80 million terabytes and would cost hundreds of millions to store. My guess is that some journalistic error occurred here, or perhaps someone confused "80 exabytes of data are generated during heart ultrasounds" with "we've stored 80 exabytes of heart ultrasound data".
  - agibsonccc 9y ago
    Yes we are in the center of this. We are analyzing all of that data ourselves. The hospitals in china (each one) emits petabytes of data themselves. There are about 1600 hospitals in all. Real time ultrasounds get synced to the cloud via devices planed in rural villages. 80 exabytes is not "journalistic error". We are building one of the largest AI research centers in china to accomplish this.
thinkfurther 9y ago
Of course it's crazy. Just like the guy on HN who told me they have to build AGI in the shadows because people just wouldn't understand, and with the other corner of their mouth talked about how "we" should go into "oblivion" peacefully once AGI makes us obsolete, is crazy. High-functioning, probably a model citizen who helps the elderly across the street, but still batshit insane on the level where push comes to shove. > The whole concept of alienation found its first expression in Western thought in the Old Testament concept of idolatry. The essence of what the prophets call "idolatry" is not that man worships many gods instead of only one. It is that the idols are the work of man's own hands -- they are things, and man bows down and worships things; worships that which he has created himself. In doing so he transforms himself into a thing. He transfers to the things of his creation the attributes of his own life, and instead of experiencing himself as the creating person, he is in touch with himself only by the worship of the idol. He has become estranged from his own life forces, from the wealth of his own potentialities, and is in touch with himself only in the indirect way of submission to life frozen in the idols. The deadness and emptiness of the idol is expressed in the Old Testament: "Eyes they have and they do not see, ears they have and they do not hear," etc. The more man transfers his own powers to the idols, the poorer he himself becomes, and the more dependent on the idols, so that they permit him to redeem a small part of what was originally his. The idols can be a godlike figure, the state, the church, a person, possessions. Idolatry changes its objects; it is by no means to be found only in those forms in which the idol has a so-called religious meaning. Idolatry is always the worship of something into which man has put his own creative powers, and to which he now submits, instead of experiencing himself in his creative act. -- Erich Fromm, who also said > The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
- PeanutCurry 9y ago
  I'm not working in machine learning so please cut me down to size if I'm just not getting it. But my big criticism of the article was that it just sort've glosses over the elephant in the room. China is going to have a massive data set... of Chinese citizens. With how much the ruling party exercises its authority over the nation and the nationalist nature of a lot of Chinese culture I don't see how this data will be broad enough to leverage against other nations in terms of making things like behavioral predictions. Everything I read about China makes these grand premonitions but really it seems like China is simply preparing to not need anybody except for China. Which is very Orwellian but a lot different from WORLD DOMINATION.
low_battery 9y ago
Ah China and AI.. Just remembered this nice piece of paper: Automated Inference on Criminality using Face Images, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.04135v2.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.04135v2.pdf At best they will become an Orwellian nightmare then they currently are, World domination? Please...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
l5870uoo9y 9y ago
The advantages that the article claims China has aren't unattainable for the West, but it does – as with other political issues — require new political movement that allows us to change our society to benefit from vast opportunities that technology brings and to avoid the dangers. China's ruthless pragmatism and decisiveness highlights the lack of political leadership and visions in the West. And those political movements we have are of little use, be it right or left.
- hueving 9y ago
  >China's ruthless pragmatism and decisiveness highlights the lack of political leadership and vision It highlights the disregard for individual rights and privacy. Giving your data away to a bunch of people trying to build new business is not something I want to be a part of.
  - l5870uoo9y 9y ago
    Possibly, but given the potential benefits of exposing data, I think we should develop a system for granting access to proper anonymized data. Besides oversigt and restrictions in such a process, companies gaining access should also have a product that is "broadly beneficial" to society.
    - tertius 9y ago
      > proper anonymized data Until it's not.
    - hueving 9y ago
      >to proper anonymized data Good luck with that. It's not an easy problem.[1][2] AOL thought they were clever enough and release a bunch of search query data in 2006 only to find out it wasn't anonymous.[3] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-anonymity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-anonymity 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy 3. http://theory.stanford.edu/~sunabar/papers/setanon.pdf http://theory.stanford.edu/~sunabar/papers/setanon.pdf
- 9y ago
gkanai 9y ago
One of the prominent Chinese VCs, Neil Shen from Sequoia China, was on the Economist's podcast recently talking about AI in China. When the host asked Shen about the Chinese state's use of AI in monitoring the citizens of China, Shen clammed up. It is an amazing bit of audio (starts around minute 8.) https://www.acast.com/theeconomistasks/theeconomistasks-howdoyouwintheairace- https://www.acast.com/theeconomistasks/theeconomistasks-howd...
- mgr86 9y ago
  that is fascinating. I can only wonder what sort of facial expression he had during the questioning.
- 77pt77 9y ago
  Your comment doesn't make it justice. The audio is totally amazing! One of the most significant silences I've heard in a long time.
  - seppin 9y ago
    "..no" When a Snowden for China finally emerges, I think it's going to be far worse than anyone imagined. And people like Shen are complicit with their silence.
    - yarg 9y ago
      People like Shen have families.
      - frozenport 9y ago
        So what? The victims of the Chinese regime also have families.
        cirath 9y ago
        I almost didn't want to type this, because not really sure if trolling or if typing this out doesn't count as pointing out the obvious -- but the implication is that Shen is a victim of the Chinese regime.
georgeecollins 9y ago
In the 1980's Japan had a "fifth generation" computer project which was a huge commitment to AI. AI appeals as a project for governments and large organizations (IBM) that want to direct goals from the top down. It is difficult to do, understandable as a goal, and could in theory serve many purposes.
- bluetwo 9y ago
  When the US government invested a billion dollars into a project to simulate the brain with computers this is exactly the throw-back project that crossed my mind.
davidreiss 9y ago
Why is it that every article about china reads like a propaganda piece. "World domination"? Was our investment in AI about "world domination" also? It is strange how propaganda spins the narrative about the same thing so differently. Anyone know if chinese media/propaganda does the same thing in regards to the west? Do they say "America or Europe's plan for world domination in AI Isn't So Crazy?".
jorblumesea 9y ago
I wonder how you contest the classification of "dissident" if it's generated by a ML algo?
joe_the_user 9y ago
Well, on the actual topic... China's state may have a huge store of data but it seems fairly likely they will want to heavily restrict who gets access to this data - secrecy is the other side of surveillance. Similarly, AI in the West seems to have advanced a lot by having open research sharing and a high level of intellectual integrity. China's authoritarian state seems to often encourage poor research - not that all science is bad in China but there's a lot of news about a lot of bad science there. Ironically, a lack of openness can make cheating more common (a Chinese team was caught cheating in AI challenge recently, just for example though of course these aren't necessarily restricted to China). Also, the Internet is a huge store of data, imagenet is pulled from the Internet. Other huge data sources are youtube and so-on. Maybe all the data a huge surveillance state captures would be a good source but that just seems like one dimension in a multidimensional competition where the rest of the dimensions might not be in favor of Chinese efforts.
AndrewKemendo 9y ago
I'm of the mind that China has the best shot at building AGI in the near future for the exact reason that if they choose to, they can mandate collection and processing of vast amounts of user data. They also have a pretty amazing group of ML developers, even if they haven't made the most public progress or had as much notoriety as Bengio, Russell, Lecun et al. One thing I find striking is that Ng left Baidu with very little discussion of why given how much progress they had been making. It's possible that he felt his role was to start and grow the Baidu AI enterprise and then move on. However I would speculate that Baidu was increasingly collaborating with the CPC and he might have not wanted to be as heavily involved in that, given that he is more Western, being raised in London and was Hong Kongese rather than culturally Han.
- LiweiZ 9y ago
  I think "from mainland" or something similar is correct instead of mentioning "culturally Han". The current culture difference was mainly formed over the process of having different rulers for both places in the 20th century. "Han" is a way broad notion for us Chinese. A fair amount of Chinese derived from "Han", an ethnic group. The reason I want to point this out is "Han" means a lot more than the current status quo, which was transformed badly after the ruling party dominated the main land.
  - AndrewKemendo 9y ago
    This is a good point, and is worth discriminating those groups.
peter303 9y ago
I have been around enough to remember a similar A.I. hype in the 1980s involving Japan, expert systems, and logic (Prolog) supercomputers. This time it is China, deep learning, and deep learning accelerator hardware. The 1980s was a commercial failure, but expert systems never really went away. One interesting project was Cyc a massive comon sense rule system, sort of like a thesarus; now into its 4th decade. Another is IBM' Watson which is a hybrid of rules and statistical large data. The difference this time is that deep learning appears to work in some cases and getting fast enough to operate in real time. One application is environmental object classification for self driving vehicles. The deep learning systems do as well as explicit algoritms and are easier to program. Secondly, I saw some papers at the recent SIGGRAPH where they replace procedural portions of graphics flows with deep learning and obtain good results. Whether deep learning can solve every problem under the Sun as some hypers claim is undetermined.

144 points by bipr0 9y ago

> The government also revealed in 2015 that it was building a nationwide database that would score citizens on their trustworthiness, which in turn would feed into their credit ratings The wet dream of an authoritarian government.

ldp01 9y ago
Wait, isn't a credit rating already a measure of (financial) trustworthiness? What kind of parameters can the government record which would actually make a credit rating more reliable?
- lispm 9y ago
  They factor in whether you are a rule obeying good citizem. The result is also not only used to put you at financial disadvantage, they use it everywhere there is a queue to put those good citizens into the front of the queue.
  - e4r5t6 9y ago
    Is Liu Xiaobo regarded as rule obeying good citizen?
    - MagnumOpus 9y ago
      Obviously not, not harmonious enough. But social rating is not for actual opposition activists who will be jailed/tortured/disappeared even without it - it is for the tens of millions of common citizens who might sympathise with them and for whom a credit rating penalty might make them think twice about expressing their support or sympathy or outrage about the injustice.
- Inconel 9y ago
  I'm fairly certain I read that this system will also allow citizens to assign trustworthiness scores to friends and acquaintances.
  - provost 9y ago
    > Credit scoring companies in the US and China are already experimenting with data from social media profiles. Counting how many times someone says “wasted” in their Facebook status can help to predict whether they will repay their debts on time, according to a trial by US credit analyst FICO. Source: https://www.ft.com/content/e8ccd7b8-6459-11e6-a08a-c7ac04ef00aa https://www.ft.com/content/e8ccd7b8-6459-11e6-a08a-c7ac04ef0... [FT might be paywalled, but I was able to reach it via Google for free]
    - Inconel 9y ago
      That's pretty unsettling. I wonder if I'm going to find myself in a similar situation regarding social networking as I found myself in regarding credit cards a number of years ago. For the longest time I didn't have any credit cards since the idea of debt really scared me but I realized I was only hurting myself by not building a credit history. I signed up for a number of cards over the years and put small recurring charges on them that I always pay off in full. Similarly, I don't really participate in much social media, HN is the exception, and I have no FB account, but I wonder if at some point my lack of public facing social media will negatively impact other areas of my life like borrowing, employment, or housing. Maybe someone enterprising can start a service that automatically posts a bunch of innocuous stuff to a FB profile so I don't have to bother wasting my time with it.
      - che_shirecat 9y ago
        The sort of profiling the parent comment was talking about doesn't work the other way around - it'd be idiotic to punish someone's credit score for not having a social media account or having it set to private/friends-only/un-crawlable. The lack of a social media account might even be a signal of better creditworthiness
      - 9y ago
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Conformity. Those who have the right harmonious thinking are more likely to be successful and less likely to be sent to jail for political crimes. The government thinks they control the rules of the entire game. Also, if you have a bad credit score, you won't be able to buy train or plane tickets in china. It just isn't about your ability to get a loan.
  - arethuza 9y ago
    I've seen the "Social Credit System" discussed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System Video describing a similar system (linked to from the wiki page): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI Possibly one of the scariest concepts I've seen in a while.
  - Shivetya 9y ago
    move to digital currency and they; or any other government for that matter; prevent you directly from providing or consuming goods and services. So combine both elements, a government controlled "score" plus digital currency and they will control the game. Then it comes down to, can barter even exist.
- ThomPete 9y ago
  Credit rating are ironically based on taking up debt to show that you can deal with debt. There are other ways to think about credit worthiness. As an example your checking and savings account can be used to show how you actually do each month, you can look at social connections to see who my friends are and if you have something like Google Wallet or Square Cash or Venmo you can also look at how good people are at paying each other back. So plenty of things to look at that aren't being recorded right now.
- zhte415 9y ago
  Credit ratings are given by credit ratings agencies. Currently, credit ratings agencies give ratings to organisations based on the fees of those same organisations asking them to rate them. This creates a conflict of interest. A large conflict of interest. Like most FinTech, and change is more a question of law and regulation than it is technology 'disrupting' an opportunity. In finance, laws or regulations change and Fintech tends to be the fastest to react. It is regulators who drive where Fintech goes (not in all cases, but in I'd argue most), however.
- candiodari 9y ago
  It's not about making credit rating more reliable, rather the opposite. It's about sabotaging the people they want sabotaged. Wrong ethnic group perhaps, or wrote a dissenting article ? No more loans or even anything but cash for you !
ThomPete 9y ago
It's actually explored in an episode of Black Mirror called Nosedive. Pretty convincing and scary.
- dave_sullivan 9y ago
  I thought Nosedive was more of a "Look what we might turn into" thing. The government didn't have much to do with it (except dragging her away when she has a knife). It was a defacto dystopia. For instance, that truck driver who ditches the system isn't getting tortured as a dissident by the gov. China's vision is much worse. * Everybody is measured by a score between 350 and 950, which is linked to their national identity card. While currently supposedly voluntary, the government has announced that it will be mandatory by 2020. * The system is run by two companies, Alibaba and Tencent, which run all the social networks in China and therefore have access to a vast amount of data about people’s social ties and activities and what they say. * In addition to measuring your ability to pay, as in the United States, the scores serve as a measure of political compliance. Among the things that will hurt a citizen’s score are posting political opinions without prior permission, or posting information that the regime does not like, such as about the Tienanmen Square massacre that the government carried out to hold on to power, or the Shanghai stock market collapse. * It will hurt your score not only if you do these things, but if any of your friends do them. Imagine the social pressure against disobedience or dissent that this will create. Anybody can check anyone else’s score online. Among other things, this lets people find out which of their friends may be hurting their scores. * Also used to calculate scores is information about hobbies, lifestyle, and shopping. Buying certain goods will improve your score, while others (such as video games) will lower it. * Those with higher scores are rewarded with concrete benefits. Those who reach 700, for example, get easy access to a Singapore travel permit, while those who hit 750 get an even more valued visa. * Sadly, many Chinese appear to be embracing the score as a measure of social worth, with almost 100,000 people bragging about their scores on the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. From http://boingboing.net/2015/10/06/reputation-economy-dystopia-c.html http://boingboing.net/2015/10/06/reputation-economy-dystopia...
  - taneq 9y ago
    Let me guess, scores above 950 are reserved for heads of state, and anyone with a score below 350 is executed?
77pt77 9y ago
Last time I spoke to a native Chinese about that he said he was not worried at all and said that the worries in the west were tremendously overblown.
- Talyen42 9y ago
  he sounds like someone with a high Trustworthy Score(tm)!
  - 77pt77 9y ago
    Well, he was studying in the West and was travelling alone at that time. Surely that's a bit "deviant".
    - dmoy 9y ago
      No that's about par for the course for the rich ruling generation's kids. Honestly though it's more likely he's apolitical and doesn't actually care or know... I'd say like 80% of young Chinese I've met are mostly apolitical or at least won't let on at all what they think (both in China and in the US).

TypedInt 9y ago

> Historically, the country has been a lightweight in those regards. It’s suffered through a "brain drain," a flight of academics and specialists out of the country Wouldn't it be crazy if a brain drain from the west to Asia arised?

seanmcdirmid 9y ago
China doesn't even have a real immigration plan in place, you are more likely to win the lottery than get permanent residency even after working there for 10 years. Simply put, they don't really want foreigners like the USA (currently) does.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- agibsonccc 9y ago
  Hi, Just want to give a different perspective here. It's definitely hard (japan was as well till recently) It's possible to get it on the right track. Tech jobs (especially depending on the province) provide incentives for a better path to something like this. I'm directly involved with the fuzhou government deal. My cofounder chris is quoted in the article. We are actually getting incentives and visas for foreign talent to move to southern china. We have a proper incorporation in china and everything setup. Their goal is to build a large scale tech hub. More of the news in mandarin from the launch: http://www.mnw.cn/news/fz/1759144.html http://www.mnw.cn/news/fz/1759144.html http://fz.fjsen.com/2017-06/27/content_19717392.htm http://fz.fjsen.com/2017-06/27/content_19717392.htm http://news.fznews.com.cn/shehui/20170627/5951957fec4fc.shtml http://news.fznews.com.cn/shehui/20170627/5951957fec4fc.shtm... http://www.chinadevelopment.com.cn/news/cy/2017/06/1154087.shtml http://www.chinadevelopment.com.cn/news/cy/2017/06/1154087.s... http://www.fjcl.gov.cn/xzdt/1709724.jhtml http://www.fjcl.gov.cn/xzdt/1709724.jhtml http://health.gmw.cn/2017-06/26/content_24892813.htm http://health.gmw.cn/2017-06/26/content_24892813.htm http://fj.people.com.cn/GB/n2/2017/0627/c181466-30385585.html http://fj.people.com.cn/GB/n2/2017/0627/c181466-30385585.htm... http://fj.people.com.cn/BIG5/n2/2017/0627/c181466-30385585.html http://fj.people.com.cn/BIG5/n2/2017/0627/c181466-30385585.h... http://news.fznews.com.cn/shehui/20170627/5951ab08e5189.shtml http://news.fznews.com.cn/shehui/20170627/5951ab08e5189.shtm... http://fz.fjsen.com/2017-06/27/content_19716514.htm http://fz.fjsen.com/2017-06/27/content_19716514.htm This actually made a large scale splash in china. We will be the primary AI vendor for the implementation. We are helping them build their own on prem infrastructure. We are hiring in china for those interested in learning more! Email in profile. Edit: updated to clarify about perm residency.

agibsonccc 9y ago

Hi, I'm actually one of the vendors involved with the healthcare project mentioned in the article (my cofounder is quoted) If you are curious about anything, AMA. More info below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15016850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15016850

Eridrus 9y ago
Is there any way for Western companies to get access to these sorts of datasets, or are they being treated as a strategic asset only to be shared with local companies?
- agibsonccc 9y ago
  Through partnerships. We have access to this kind of data due to our strategic relationship with CEC Data (the company that owns the data). We also have an incorporated chinese entity in fuzhou itself which handles this. We have people based in beijing analyzing the data. It's all on premise.
lightcatcher 9y ago
> At the press conference, city officials shared 80 exabytes worth of heart ultrasound videos, according to one company that participated. Do you know anything about this? 80 exabytes is an insane amount of storage and is orders of magnitude larger than any dataset I'm familiar with. I believe Common Crawl is in the petabytes range, and [0] describes training a neural net on 300 million images (which would be 300PB if each image was 1MB, but I suspect images are smaller). 80 exabytes is 80 million terabytes and would cost hundreds of millions to store. My guess is that some journalistic error occurred here, or perhaps someone confused "80 exabytes of data are generated during heart ultrasounds" with "we've stored 80 exabytes of heart ultrasound data".
- agibsonccc 9y ago
  Yes we are in the center of this. We are analyzing all of that data ourselves. The hospitals in china (each one) emits petabytes of data themselves. There are about 1600 hospitals in all. Real time ultrasounds get synced to the cloud via devices planed in rural villages. 80 exabytes is not "journalistic error". We are building one of the largest AI research centers in china to accomplish this.

thinkfurther 9y ago

Of course it's crazy. Just like the guy on HN who told me they have to build AGI in the shadows because people just wouldn't understand, and with the other corner of their mouth talked about how "we" should go into "oblivion" peacefully once AGI makes us obsolete, is crazy. High-functioning, probably a model citizen who helps the elderly across the street, but still batshit insane on the level where push comes to shove. > The whole concept of alienation found its first expression in Western thought in the Old Testament concept of idolatry. The essence of what the prophets call "idolatry" is not that man worships many gods instead of only one. It is that the idols are the work of man's own hands -- they are things, and man bows down and worships things; worships that which he has created himself. In doing so he transforms himself into a thing. He transfers to the things of his creation the attributes of his own life, and instead of experiencing himself as the creating person, he is in touch with himself only by the worship of the idol. He has become estranged from his own life forces, from the wealth of his own potentialities, and is in touch with himself only in the indirect way of submission to life frozen in the idols. The deadness and emptiness of the idol is expressed in the Old Testament: "Eyes they have and they do not see, ears they have and they do not hear," etc. The more man transfers his own powers to the idols, the poorer he himself becomes, and the more dependent on the idols, so that they permit him to redeem a small part of what was originally his. The idols can be a godlike figure, the state, the church, a person, possessions. Idolatry changes its objects; it is by no means to be found only in those forms in which the idol has a so-called religious meaning. Idolatry is always the worship of something into which man has put his own creative powers, and to which he now submits, instead of experiencing himself in his creative act. -- Erich Fromm, who also said > The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane.

PeanutCurry 9y ago
I'm not working in machine learning so please cut me down to size if I'm just not getting it. But my big criticism of the article was that it just sort've glosses over the elephant in the room. China is going to have a massive data set... of Chinese citizens. With how much the ruling party exercises its authority over the nation and the nationalist nature of a lot of Chinese culture I don't see how this data will be broad enough to leverage against other nations in terms of making things like behavioral predictions. Everything I read about China makes these grand premonitions but really it seems like China is simply preparing to not need anybody except for China. Which is very Orwellian but a lot different from WORLD DOMINATION.

low_battery 9y ago

Ah China and AI.. Just remembered this nice piece of paper: Automated Inference on Criminality using Face Images, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.04135v2.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.04135v2.pdf At best they will become an Orwellian nightmare then they currently are, World domination? Please...

deleted 9y ago
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l5870uoo9y 9y ago

The advantages that the article claims China has aren't unattainable for the West, but it does – as with other political issues — require new political movement that allows us to change our society to benefit from vast opportunities that technology brings and to avoid the dangers. China's ruthless pragmatism and decisiveness highlights the lack of political leadership and visions in the West. And those political movements we have are of little use, be it right or left.

hueving 9y ago
>China's ruthless pragmatism and decisiveness highlights the lack of political leadership and vision It highlights the disregard for individual rights and privacy. Giving your data away to a bunch of people trying to build new business is not something I want to be a part of.
- l5870uoo9y 9y ago
  Possibly, but given the potential benefits of exposing data, I think we should develop a system for granting access to proper anonymized data. Besides oversigt and restrictions in such a process, companies gaining access should also have a product that is "broadly beneficial" to society.
  - tertius 9y ago
    > proper anonymized data Until it's not.
  - hueving 9y ago
    >to proper anonymized data Good luck with that. It's not an easy problem.[1][2] AOL thought they were clever enough and release a bunch of search query data in 2006 only to find out it wasn't anonymous.[3] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-anonymity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-anonymity 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy 3. http://theory.stanford.edu/~sunabar/papers/setanon.pdf http://theory.stanford.edu/~sunabar/papers/setanon.pdf
9y ago

gkanai 9y ago

One of the prominent Chinese VCs, Neil Shen from Sequoia China, was on the Economist's podcast recently talking about AI in China. When the host asked Shen about the Chinese state's use of AI in monitoring the citizens of China, Shen clammed up. It is an amazing bit of audio (starts around minute 8.) https://www.acast.com/theeconomistasks/theeconomistasks-howdoyouwintheairace- https://www.acast.com/theeconomistasks/theeconomistasks-howd...

mgr86 9y ago
that is fascinating. I can only wonder what sort of facial expression he had during the questioning.
77pt77 9y ago
Your comment doesn't make it justice. The audio is totally amazing! One of the most significant silences I've heard in a long time.
- seppin 9y ago
  "..no" When a Snowden for China finally emerges, I think it's going to be far worse than anyone imagined. And people like Shen are complicit with their silence.
  - yarg 9y ago
    People like Shen have families.
    - frozenport 9y ago
      So what? The victims of the Chinese regime also have families.
      - cirath 9y ago
        I almost didn't want to type this, because not really sure if trolling or if typing this out doesn't count as pointing out the obvious -- but the implication is that Shen is a victim of the Chinese regime.

georgeecollins 9y ago

In the 1980's Japan had a "fifth generation" computer project which was a huge commitment to AI. AI appeals as a project for governments and large organizations (IBM) that want to direct goals from the top down. It is difficult to do, understandable as a goal, and could in theory serve many purposes.

bluetwo 9y ago
When the US government invested a billion dollars into a project to simulate the brain with computers this is exactly the throw-back project that crossed my mind.

davidreiss 9y ago

Why is it that every article about china reads like a propaganda piece. "World domination"? Was our investment in AI about "world domination" also? It is strange how propaganda spins the narrative about the same thing so differently. Anyone know if chinese media/propaganda does the same thing in regards to the west? Do they say "America or Europe's plan for world domination in AI Isn't So Crazy?".

jorblumesea 9y ago

I wonder how you contest the classification of "dissident" if it's generated by a ML algo?

joe_the_user 9y ago

Well, on the actual topic... China's state may have a huge store of data but it seems fairly likely they will want to heavily restrict who gets access to this data - secrecy is the other side of surveillance. Similarly, AI in the West seems to have advanced a lot by having open research sharing and a high level of intellectual integrity. China's authoritarian state seems to often encourage poor research - not that all science is bad in China but there's a lot of news about a lot of bad science there. Ironically, a lack of openness can make cheating more common (a Chinese team was caught cheating in AI challenge recently, just for example though of course these aren't necessarily restricted to China). Also, the Internet is a huge store of data, imagenet is pulled from the Internet. Other huge data sources are youtube and so-on. Maybe all the data a huge surveillance state captures would be a good source but that just seems like one dimension in a multidimensional competition where the rest of the dimensions might not be in favor of Chinese efforts.

AndrewKemendo 9y ago

I'm of the mind that China has the best shot at building AGI in the near future for the exact reason that if they choose to, they can mandate collection and processing of vast amounts of user data. They also have a pretty amazing group of ML developers, even if they haven't made the most public progress or had as much notoriety as Bengio, Russell, Lecun et al. One thing I find striking is that Ng left Baidu with very little discussion of why given how much progress they had been making. It's possible that he felt his role was to start and grow the Baidu AI enterprise and then move on. However I would speculate that Baidu was increasingly collaborating with the CPC and he might have not wanted to be as heavily involved in that, given that he is more Western, being raised in London and was Hong Kongese rather than culturally Han.

LiweiZ 9y ago
I think "from mainland" or something similar is correct instead of mentioning "culturally Han". The current culture difference was mainly formed over the process of having different rulers for both places in the 20th century. "Han" is a way broad notion for us Chinese. A fair amount of Chinese derived from "Han", an ethnic group. The reason I want to point this out is "Han" means a lot more than the current status quo, which was transformed badly after the ruling party dominated the main land.
- AndrewKemendo 9y ago
  This is a good point, and is worth discriminating those groups.

peter303 9y ago

I have been around enough to remember a similar A.I. hype in the 1980s involving Japan, expert systems, and logic (Prolog) supercomputers. This time it is China, deep learning, and deep learning accelerator hardware. The 1980s was a commercial failure, but expert systems never really went away. One interesting project was Cyc a massive comon sense rule system, sort of like a thesarus; now into its 4th decade. Another is IBM' Watson which is a hybrid of rules and statistical large data. The difference this time is that deep learning appears to work in some cases and getting fast enough to operate in real time. One application is environmental object classification for self driving vehicles. The deep learning systems do as well as explicit algoritms and are easier to program. Secondly, I saw some papers at the recent SIGGRAPH where they replace procedural portions of graphics flows with deep learning and obtain good results. Whether deep learning can solve every problem under the Sun as some hypers claim is undetermined.