China’s AI Progress Sparks Fears of ‘Dystopian’ Future

Congressman Mike Gallagher warns that the ‘free world needs to be in command of the rules of AI going forward.’
China’s AI Progress Sparks Fears of ‘Dystopian’ Future
A display for facial recognition and artificial intelligence is seen on monitors at Huawei's Bantian campus on April 26, 2019 in Shenzhen, China. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
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Washington and Beijing have quietly engaged in a dialog surrounding the safe development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), but behind the talks remains fierce competition over the technology’s development and how it should be used.

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, rang the alarm in May last year in an interview with DailyMail.com that the communist regime had developed AI-related technologies for “dystopian” and “evil uses” spanning genocide and daily surveillance of citizens.
Last July and October, U.S.-China AI experts secretly met twice in Geneva to discuss the risks of emerging technologies and encourage investment in AI research, reported the Financial Times.

U.S. participants included scientists from research organizations like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere, while Chinese experts came from state-run Tsinghua University and other state-funded institutions.

In November, 28 countries signed the Bletchley Declaration at the first-ever AI Safety Summit in the U.K., concurring in a collective effort to ensure that AI would be used in a “human-centric, trustworthy and responsible” manner.

The communiqué recognizes that advanced AI models can cause “potential for serious, even catastrophic, harm.”

China and the United States—the two most competitive rivalries in AI tech—signed the engagement, along with the U.K. European Union, France, Germany, Japan, Kenya, and Nigeria.

Japanese electrical engineer Li Jixin told The Epoch Times that AI intelligence experts coincidentally have a cautious attitude toward the development of AI as it can potentially harm humanity.

“Although it seems that AI can bring convenience to human beings in the short term, there is a risk of abuse and loss of control at any time; in addition, the internet will expand that risk globally, and it can do so extremely quickly—putting human civilization at risk,” Mr. Li said.

AI Used to Control Chinese

A bipartisan group of 17 senators stated in a March 2020 letter to then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that “China uses facial recognition to profile Uyghur individuals, classify them on the basis of their ethnicity, and single them out for tracking, mistreatment, and detention.”

Facial recognition technology is also used to spy on ordinary citizens. A database leak in 2019 provided a glimpse into the pervasiveness of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surveillance tools that made more than 6.8 million records in a single day from cameras around hotels, parks, tourist attractions, and mosques.

Facial recognition is used in China. (The Epoch Times)
Facial recognition is used in China. The Epoch Times

Mr. Li believes AI technology is being designed to monitor the nationals because “the CCP is not a democratically elected government and has no natural legitimacy, and the most crucial thing it [CCP] fears is losing its power.”

AI applications and other technological means would closely monitor people’s words and actions to identify dissenters; thus, they could be targeted by the state, Mr. Li said.

The CCP has even gone so far as to use AI technology to oversee people’s thoughts. In July 2022, an AI research institute in Hefei, Anhui province, claimed that it had developed mind-reading software that could measure the loyalty of Communist Party members by testing a subject’s level of commitment to the Party’s ideological education. 

Exporting AI Surveillance Tech

The CCP has been exporting AI technology used for citizen surveillance to other countries to gain dominance in AI while also collecting big data globally.
Several dozen countries, including Zimbabwe and Uzbekistan, have built or are building large-scale surveillance systems based on AI with the help of CCP, according to a report by the U.S. human rights group Freedom House last year.

More than 140 cities worldwide have adopted Chinese facial recognition technology to create “safe cities” and “smart cities” in transportation, logistics, and law enforcement.

People are seen on screens from closed circuit television security cameras at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, China, on July 6, 2023. (Wang Zhao/AFP via Getty Images)
People are seen on screens from closed circuit television security cameras at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, China, on July 6, 2023. Wang Zhao/AFP via Getty Images
In addition, Thailand, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Vietnam have negotiated with Chinese companies to introduce state-of-the-art public surveillance systems, wrote commentator Hiroyuki Akita in Nikkei Asia in 2019.

The Republican Square in Belgrade, Serbia’s capital, has also been fitted with Chinese-made surveillance equipment. Huawei’s surveillance system can monitor people’s behavior in the square and elsewhere in the city, recognizing their faces, identifying their license plate numbers, and determining suspicious activity.

Mr. Akita wrote that the CCP’s export of authoritarianism to other countries poses a fundamental and long-term threat to the U.S.-led post-war free world order.

“In this war for hegemony, political power is as important as economic and military power. If other Asian countries tread the path of democracy, it will be easier for the U.S. to maintain its influence in the region. If, however, many Asian nations opt for authoritarianism, the foundations of the U.S.-led liberal order will gradually erode,” he said.

In addition to exporting facial recognition technology overseas, the CCP trains workers for the AI industry in developing countries through its “Luban Workshop” program. The CCP also helped the UAE establish the AI company G42, which claims to have set up the world’s largest AI supercomputer with China.

Researchers at the Center for New American Security warned about the CCP’s overseas expansions in a Politico article on Nov. 30, 2023.

“The upshot may well be an AI future in which the United States’ and Europe’s painstaking agreements on safe, rights-respecting AI are rendered obsolete by a world already hardwired with Chinese AI systems—winning Beijing favor among non-Western nations and setting de facto authoritarian standards for the technology’s development globally,” they wrote.

Mr. Gallagher said the AI race with the CCP is heating up, and the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party which he heads, is poised to play a leading role in “ensuring U.S. dominance.”
Chairman of the House Select Committee on China Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) delivers remarks to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the White Paper movement in China alongside a group of students and Chinese pro-democracy activists outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Nov. 29, 2023. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Chairman of the House Select Committee on China Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) delivers remarks to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the White Paper movement in China alongside a group of students and Chinese pro-democracy activists outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Nov. 29, 2023. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

The overall goal is to convince the American people that “this technology isn’t going to be used for evil” and that the U.S. government will stay ahead of the Chinese communists.

“I think it’s absolutely critical that we do not allow [the CCP] to win this race because they would use it for a techno-totalitarian, dystopian purpose, and the free world needs to be in command of the rules of AI going forward,” he said.

We need a “unified framework on AI guardrails and AI ethics,” Mr. Gallagher said.

US, China Compete Around AI Tech

AI is becoming “a crucial component of economic and military power in the near future,” according to Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2023.

Over the past years, the United States and China have locked into a fierce race in all aspects of AI technology.

U.S. companies and organizations have developed most of the world’s major languages and intermodal models. In 2022, China developed only three machine learning systems, while the U.S. created 16, including OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, GPT-3, and Google’s PaLM.

The U.S. also leads the pack in private investment in AI technology. In 2022, U.S. private investors brought in $47.4 billion, roughly 3.5 times as much as China. The United States leads the world in total new investments in AI companies, 3.4 times more than China.
Screens displaying the logos of OpenAI and ChatGPT are pictured in Toulouse, France, on Jan. 23, 2023. (LIONEL BONAVENTURE/AFP via Getty Images)
Screens displaying the logos of OpenAI and ChatGPT are pictured in Toulouse, France, on Jan. 23, 2023. LIONEL BONAVENTURE/AFP via Getty Images
According to the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. dominates the semiconductor design market with 85 percent of the world’s share.

Conversely, China is the largest importer and semiconductor market, relying on U.S. chips.

To restrict the advancement of Chinese AI technology, Washington has implemented export controls on high-end chips, preventing advanced chips from falling into the hands of the CCP for the purpose of developing supercomputers or semiconductors for military or other applications.

Beijing, in a tit-for-tat retaliatory, counter-backed by restricting exports of rare minerals to America.

Meanwhile, the CCP doubled down on its chip exploration.

Last August, Huawei released the Mate 60 Pro cellphone with the Chinese-made Kirin 9,000s 7nm processor. Baidu, the Chinese internet service provider, is reportedly developing the Kunlun chip for AI computing. State media even boasts of China developing a photonic chip that is “3,000 times faster” than NVIDIA A100, one of the most widely used commercial AI chips.

Yet, it needs to value the quality and how advanced the chips made in China are. But “in total AI journal, conference, and repository publications,” China has long held the first place, as indicated in the Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2023.

In 2021, Chinese researchers published nearly 40 percent of the world’s AI publications, more than the U.K., Europe (15.1 percent), and the U.S. (10 percent) combined, and China has the largest share of the world’s AI conference publications in 2021, at 26.2 percent. Nine of the top 10 AI publishers are from China, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which ranks tenth.

Mr. Li pointed out that the Chinese dictatorial regime exercises a prerogative in developing AI that no legalistic countries have, that is, to “arbitrarily obtain and misuse the private information of its citizens.”

Usually, legalistic countries tend to heed protecting people’s private information, so tech companies cannot acquire substantial personal information for AI training.

“In China, on the contrary, the populous can’t monitor the government, so the CCP is free to access personal privacies to build up big data for AI training,” he said.

As a result, Mr. Li said, China’s surveillance and internet censorship technology are far superior to other countries.

Jenny Li has contributed to The Epoch Times since 2010. She has reported on Chinese politics, economics, human rights issues, and U.S.-China relations. She has extensively interviewed Chinese scholars, economists, lawyers, and rights activists in China and overseas.
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