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FOREIGN AFFAIRS
How Artificial Intelligence Will Reshape the Global Order
The Coming Competition Between Digital Authoritarianism and Liberal
Democracy
By Nicholas Wright
The debate over the effects of artificial intelligence has been
dominated by two themes. One is the fear of a singularity, an event in
which an AI exceeds human intelligence and escapes human control, with
possibly disastrous consequences. The other is the worry that a new
industrial revolution will allow machines to disrupt and replace humans
in every—or almost every—area of society, from transport to the military
to healthcare.
There is also a third way in which
AI promises to
reshape the world. By allowing governments to monitor, understand, and
control their citizens far more closely than ever before, AI will offer
authoritarian countries a plausible alternative to liberal democracy,
the first since the end of the Cold War. That will spark renewed
international competition between social systems.
For decades, most political theorists have believed that liberal
democracy offers the only path to sustained economic success. Either
governments could repress their people and remain poor or liberate them
and reap the economic benefits. Some repressive countries managed to
grow their economies for a time, but in the long run authoritarianism
always meant stagnation. AI promises to upend that dichotomy.
It offers a plausible way for big, economically advanced countries to
make their citizens rich while maintaining control over them.
Some countries are already moving in this direction. China has begun to
construct a digital authoritarian state by using surveillance and
machine learning tools to control restive populations, and by creating
what it calls a “social credit system.” Several like-minded countries
have begun to buy or emulate Chinese systems. Just as competition
between liberal democratic, fascist, and communist social systems
defined much of the twentieth century, so the struggle between liberal
democracy and digital authoritarianism is set to define the
twenty-first.
DIGITAL AUTHORITARIANISM
New technologies will enable high levels of social control at a
reasonable cost. Governments will be able selectively censor topics and
behaviors to allow information for economically productive activities to
flow freely, while curbing political discussions that might damage the
regime. China’s so-called Great Firewall provides an early demonstration
of this kind of selective censorship.
As well as retroactively censoring speech, AI and big data will allow
predictive control of potential dissenters. This will resemble Amazon or
Google’s consumer targeting but will be much more effective, as
authoritarian governments will be able to draw on data in ways that are
not allowed in liberal democracies. Amazon and Google have access only
to data from some accounts and devices; an AI designed for social
control will draw data from the multiplicity of devices someone
interacts with during their daily life. And even more important,
authoritarian regimes will have no compunction about combining such data
with information from tax returns, medical records, criminal records,
sexual-health clinics, bank statements, genetic screenings, physical
information (such as location, biometrics, and CCTV monitoring using
facial recognition software), and information gleaned from family and
friends. AI is as good as the data it has access to. Unfortunately, the
quantity and quality of data available to governments on every citizen
will prove excellent for training AI systems.
Even the mere existence of this kind of predictive control will help
authoritarians. Self-censorship was perhaps the East German Stasi’s most
important disciplinary mechanism. AI will make the tactic dramatically
more effective. People will know that the omnipresent monitoring of
their physical and digital activities will be used to predict undesired
behavior, even actions they are merely contemplating. From a technical
perspective, such predictions are no different from using AI health-care
systems to predict diseases in seemingly healthy people before their
symptoms show.
In order to prevent the system from making negative predictions, many
people will begin to mimic the behaviors of a “responsible” member of
society. These may be as subtle as how long one’s eyes look at different
elements on a phone screen. This will improve social control not only by
forcing people to act in certain ways, but also by changing the way they
think. A central finding in the cognitive science of influence is that
making people perform behaviors can change their attitudes and lead to
self-reinforcing habits. Making people expound a position makes them
more likely to support it, a technique used by the Chinese on U.S.
prisoners of war during the Korean War. Salespeople know that getting a
potential customer to perform small behaviors can change attitudes to
later, bigger requests. More than 60 years of laboratory and fieldwork
have shown humans’ remarkable capacity to rationalize their behaviors.
As well as more effective control, AI also promises better central
economic planning. As Jack Ma, the founder of the Chinese tech titan
Alibaba, argues, with enough information, central authorities can direct
the economy by planning and predicting market forces. Rather than slow,
inflexible, one-size-fits-all plans, AI promises rapid and detailed
responses to customers’ needs.
There’s no guarantee that this kind of digital authoritarianism will
work in the long run, but it may not need to, as long as it is a
plausible model for which some countries can aim. That will be enough to
spark a new ideological competition. If governments start to see digital
authoritarianism as a viable alternative to liberal democracy, they will
feel no pressure to liberalize. Even if the model fails in the end,
attempts to implement it could last for a long time. Communist and
fascist models collapsed only after thorough attempts to implement them
failed in the real world.
CREATING AND EXPORTING AN ALL-SEEING STATE
No matter how useful a system of social control might prove to a regime,
building one would not be easy. Big IT projects are notoriously hard to
pull off. They require high levels of coordination, generous funding,
and plenty of expertise. For a sense of whether such a system is
feasible, it’s worth looking to China, the most important non-Western
country that might build one.
China has proved that it can deliver huge, society-spanning IT projects,
such as the Great Firewall. It also has the funding to build major new
systems. Last year, the country’s internal security budget was at least
$196 billion, a 12 percent increase from 2016. Much of the jump was
probably driven by the need for new big data platforms. China also has
expertise in AI. Chinese companies are global leaders in AI research and
Chinese software engineers often beat their American counterparts in
international competitions. Finally, technologies, such as smartphones,
that are already widespread can form the backbone of a personal
monitoring system. Smartphone ownership rates in China are nearing those
in the West and in some areas, such as mobile payments, China is the
world leader.
China is already building the core components of a digital authoritarian
system. The Great Firewall is sophisticated and well established, and it
has tightened over the past year. Freedom House, a think tank, rates
China the world’s worst abuser of Internet freedom. China is
implementing extensive surveillance in the physical world, as well. In
2014, it announced a social credit scheme, which will compute an
integrated grade that reflects the quality of every citizen’s conduct,
as understood by the government. The development of China’s surveillance
state has gone furthest in Xinjiang Province, where it is being used to
monitor and control the Muslim Uighur population. Those whom the system
deems unsafe are shut out of everyday life; many are even sent to
reeducation centers. If Beijing wants, it could roll out the system
nationwide.
To be sure, ability is not the same as intention. But China seems to be
moving toward authoritarianism and away from any suggestion of
liberalization. The government clearly believes that AI and big data
will do much to enable this new direction. China’s 2017 AI Development
Plan describes how the ability to predict and “grasp group cognition”
means “AI brings new opportunities for social construction.”
Digital authoritarianism is not confined to China. Beijing is exporting
its model.The Great Firewall approach to the Internet has spread to
Thailand and Vietnam. According to news reports, Chinese experts have
provided support for government censors in Sri Lanka and supplied
surveillance or censorship equipment to Ethiopia, Iran, Russia, Zambia,
and Zimbabwe. Earlier this year, the Chinese AI firm Yitu sold “wearable
cameras with artificial intelligence-powered facial-recognition
technology” to Malaysian law enforcement.
More broadly, China and Russia have pushed back against the U.S.
conception of a free, borderless, and global Internet. China uses its
diplomatic and market power to influence global technical standards and
normalize the idea that domestic governments should control the Internet
in ways that sharply limit individual freedom. After reportedly heated
competition for influence over a new forum that will set international
standards for AI, the United States secured the secretariat, which helps
guide the group’s decisions, while Beijing hosted its first meeting,
this April, and Wael Diab, a senior director at Huawei, secured the
chairmanship of the committee. To the governments that employ them,
these measures may seem defensive—necessary to ensure domestic
control—but other governments may perceive them as tantamount to attacks
on their way of life.
THE DEMOCRATIC RESPONSE
The rise of an authoritarian technological model of governance could,
perhaps counterintuitively, rejuvenate liberal democracies.How liberal
democracies respond to AI’s challenges and opportunities depends partly
on how they deal with them internally and partly on how they deal with
the authoritarian alternative externally. In both cases, grounds exist
for guarded optimism.
Internally, although established democracies will need to make concerted
efforts to manage the rise of new technologies, the challenges aren’t
obviously greater than those democracies have overcome before. One big
reason for optimism is path dependence. Countries with strong traditions
of individual liberty will likely go in one direction with new
technology; those without them will likely go another. Strong forces
within U.S. society have long pushed back against domestic government
mass surveillance programs, albeit with variable success. In the early
years of this century, for example, the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency began to construct “Total Information Awareness”
domestic surveillance systems to bring together medical, financial,
physical and other data. Opposition from media and civil liberties
groups led Congress to defund the program, although it left some
workarounds hidden from the public at the time. Most citizens in liberal
democracies acknowledge the need for espionage abroad and domestic
counterterrorism surveillance, but powerful checks and balances
constrain the state’s security apparatus. Those checks and balances are
under attack today and need fortification, but this will be more a
repeat of past efforts than a fundamentally new challenge.
In the West, governments are not the only ones to pose a threat to
individual freedoms. Oligopolistic technology companies are
concentrating power by gobbling up competitors and lobbying governments
to enact favorable regulations. Yet societies have overcome this
challenge before, after past technological revolutions. Think of U.S.
President Theodore Roosevelt’s trust-busting, AT&T’s breakup in the
1980s, and the limits that regulators put on Microsoft during the
Internet’s rise in the 1990s.
Digital giants are also hurting media diversity and support for public
interest content as well as creating a Wild West in political
advertising. But previously radical new technologies, such as radio and
television, posed similar problems and societies rose to the challenge.
In the end, regulation will likely catch up with the new definitions of
“media” and “publisher” created by the Internet. Facebook Chief
Executive Mark Zuckerberg resisted labeling political advertising in the
same way as is required on television, until political pressure forced
his hand last year.
Liberal democracies are unlikely to be won over to digital
authoritarianism. Recent polling suggests that a declining proportion in
Western societies view democracy as “essential,” but this is a long way
from a genuine weakening of Western democracy.
The external challenge of a new authoritarian competitor may perhaps
strengthen liberal democracies. The human tendency to frame competition
in us versus them terms may lead Western countries to define their
attitudes to censorship and surveillance at least partly in opposition
to the new competition. Most people find the nitty-gritty of data policy
boring and pay little attention to the risks of surveillance. But when
these issues underpin a dystopian regime in the real world they will
prove neither boring nor abstract. Governments and technology firms in
liberal democracies will have to explain how they are different.
LESSONS FOR THE WEST
The West can do very little to change the trajectory of a country as
capable and confident as China. Digital authoritarian states will likely
be around for a while. To compete with them, liberal democracies will
need clear strategies. First, governments and societies should
rigorously limit domestic surveillance and manipulation. Technology
giants should be broken up and regulated. Governments need to ensure a
diverse, healthy media environment, for instance by ensuring that
overmighty gatekeepers such as Facebook do not reduce media plurality;
funding public service broadcasting; and updating the regulations
covering political advertising to fit the online world. They should
enact laws preventing technology firms from exploiting other sources of
personal data, such as medical records, on their customers and should
radically curtail data collection from across the multiplicity of
platforms with which people come into contact. Even governments should
be banned from using such data except in a few circumstances, such as
counterterrorism operations.
Second, Western countries should work to influence how states that are
neither solidly democratic nor solidly authoritarian implement AI and
big data systems. They should provide aid to develop states’ physical
and regulatory infrastructure and use the access provided by that aid to
prevent governments from using joined-up data. They should promote
international norms that respect individual privacy as well as state
sovereignty. And they should demarcate the use of AI and metadata for
legitimate national security purposes from its use in suppressing human
rights.
Finally, Western countries must prepare to push back against the digital
authoritarian heartland. Vast AI systems will prove vulnerable to
disruption, although as regimes come to rely ever more on them for
security, governments will have to take care that tit-for-tat cycles of
retribution don’t spiral out of control. Systems that selectively censor
communications will enable economic creativity but will also inevitably
reveal the outside world. Winning the contest with digital authoritarian
governments will not be impossible—as long as liberal democracies can
summon the necessary political will to join the struggle |