Brave sealed world –Part III: The discreet charm of the authority
This story comes fourth in a five-parts reading about the pandemic. It argues that the outbreak has vertiginously accelerated a worldwide authoritarian trend that has been rampant for twenty years.
- Introduction: 28 Days Later
about the strange hopes triggered by the outbreak at its western beginning - Part 1: Contagion
about the mechanisms that triggered panic among citizens, markets and governments - Part 2: Parasite
how differing interests orchestrated the panic to mute the public debate
Part 3: The Discreet Charm of the Authority
how the proclaimed epidemiological success of China and the Asian Dragons becomes one more nail in a twenty-years-old coffin
- Conclusion: Deliverance
an argument that a tightly controlled society is already at the very root of the crisis.
The Great Game
It was ill-advised for President Trump to draw public attention towards South Korea, as beyond its Parasite success at the academy awards, its success in fighting coronavirus was soon to become resounding. In fact, any scrutiny towards the east might turn out to be perilous for the US authorities. On top of South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and China could also look at the US (and most of the western world) with a smugly gaze when it comes to managing the epidemic.
A smugly gaze from the international community is something China came to experience in 2003. In 2003, the UN, through the World Health Organization, publicly made China guilty of concealing the scale of the outbreak, which was seen as a humiliation. Seventeen years later, China acts as a global model. Whether it came from a pangolin or a bat, the new outbreak empowered China to reverse the past pandemic scenarii.
The comeback is already known as “mask diplomacy”: on January 23rd, 100,000 masks and 50,000 screening tests were publicly delivered to Italy. The delivery was widely reported in the newspapers in China, similarly to the medical staff previously sent on March 12th. Between the two events, a first shipment had been embarrassingly hijacked by the customs during a stopover in the Czech Republic, making Europe lose face even more. China delivering aid to Europe through the new silk roads, and adding a healthcare component to the Belts and Roads Initiatives: the symbol is strong. Media outlets in China also reported on bilateral conversations between leader Xi and other heads of state, which English readers can foretaste on Global Times, published both in mandarin and in English. The management of the crisis, seventeen years after the seminal episode of SARS (or, by now, “sars-cov-1”), was the opportunity for China to showcase to the world a shift of power in the global health hierarchy.
But the rhetoric of global health as a geopolitical weapon can turn more aggressive. A ministry spokesman also spread the word on Twitter that the pandemic outbreak originated in US army laboratories, and spread to Wuhan in October during the Military World Games. Which is only fair play, considering the already outlined blame game initiated by the US government.
China and the US are hardly the only countries using sars-covid-19 for their own political agenda: the Cuban delegation in Italy was also highly publicized. The Defense Minister in Zimbabwe declared “God is punishing countries that have imposed sanctions” (namely, the US) on the country. Russia carries out an airlift between Moscow and Rome, carrying equipment in cases stamped: “From Russia with Love”.
The EU also accused Russia to fuel a disinformation campaign, aimed at aggravating the public health crisis in Western countries. The report from the European External Action Service refers to at least eighty Russia-related reports, notably in Iran, Lithuania and Ukraine, spreading the news that the virus originated in US laboratories.
Whether that is true or not, Russia had already been much further in the game. While the market price of Brent oil was still on a tense but controlled slope, in line with the forecasted economic impact of the virus, the steep fall initiated on Monday 9th is anything but a spontaneous trading panic. It was orchestrated on previous Friday, when the Russian Minister of Energy shattered the OPEP+ alliance that bonded Moscow and Riyadh. This alliance aimed at controlling oil pricing by controlling production, in order to maintain a price that is not too competitive for American shale oil, but still viable for OPEP members. When Russia rejects Saudi Arabia’s proposal to cut production, the message is clear: the time has come for a new price war, in order to bankrupt American shale oil producers (shale oil is economically less viable than crude oil, on top of being an ecological disaster). The price war such as the one that bled Saudi Arabia in 2016 and was the reason for creating OPEP+. Facing the new situation, the Kingdom opened the floodgates. Collateral damage might turn fatal for Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria or Algeria in this triangular war between the US, Russia and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Shortly after oil price started to plummet, stock exchanges followed suit.
Whatever it takes, claim western central banks and governments, in an attempt to ease the markets. But “whatever” also means leveraging the crisis in a global economy that insists on blind competition and economic gains instead of cooperation. “We are at war”, said Macron to his fellow citizens. Did he have that kind of war in mind?
We’ve been used in Europe, with decades of stability, to think of the prospect of war as a distant thing of the past, as the economic gains of cooperation across Europe proved to be superior to any conquest motivated war. This is a very egocentric vision of the world, neglecting the fact that Europe’s prosperity relies on externalities such as exploiting resources from third parties, and exploiting their population for producing our consumer goods.
The Great Game still lives. Only new players joined in since the spy tales of Rudyard Kipling, the stakes of the game have changed, the spheres of influence have grown worldwide, and new dimensions have been added to the trade routes.
The Imitation Game
As part of the game, masks, medication and physicians are following the new trade route such as the new silk roads. But virtual dimensions also play a central role. Back to South Korea, the most efficient country to date at containing. And the country that kept COVID-19 in check without even a strict lockdown strategy. Indeed, two other Asian Dragons, Singapore and Hong Kong, had comparable success, without shutting down factories, malls or even restaurants and schools. Their policy, polished through previous coronavirus outbreaks in 2003 (SARS) and 2015 (MERS), included massive screening testing, and quarantining people at risk only.
But not only. As for China, the Dragons also resorted to advanced data monitoring in order to “backtrack” (another viral neologism, playing in the same league as “flatten the curve” and “social distancing”) possibly infected citizens, test them and quarantine them if necessary.
But “backtracking” or contact tracing is obviously too vague. Contact tracing could imply a process similar to that of probable cause and search warrant within the field of justice. Once a “sanitary judge” deems it necessary, or even better, within a clear consent framework, the authority could conduct a search on a strictly confined scope of the digital data of an infected person. Such a process would be much less invasive than the bulk surveillance the US were operating within the PRISM program disclosed by Edward Snowden in 2013. The issue is neither the regulatory nor the technical frameworks probably exist as of today.
So, what is the relevant data used for backtracking, what is the source, how is it exploited, and how was it made socially acceptable?
Socially acceptable depends on the local culture, and the paraphernalia used by each Dragon had its own flavor. From what we know: South Korea mapped social interactions using credit card transactions and carrier data for geolocation. Geolocation using metadata from the mobile carrier is far from delivering a signal accurate enough to determine the venue of a person, so geolocation was completed with surveillance camera, or geolocation data directly from the phone (much more accurate as it can use several signals like GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth contact with other devices). This could guarantee access to the whereabouts of the investigated person. But to map potential contacts and access to their precise geolocation data, authorities need access to server data from apps installed on other persons users; and this is bulk surveillance.
Hong Kong resorted to a more decentralized technology, publicly reporting work and residency location along with descriptions (age, gender…) of newly infected persons, to let persons in contact report themselves. Though less invasive from a data privacy standpoint, the public aspect of it would trigger obvious backlash in France. As for Singapore, we know little except for the precision and efficiency of the tracking data used.
An emerging diseases expert at the WHO said on NPR “it’s really important for us to take the examples of all these countries, look at what they did as it relates to the epidemiology in their country and learn from them.” Does WHO know about these regulatory and technical “details”?
Whether it does or not, western governments were quite quick on absorbing the idea. Most democracies are proving ready to imitate the Dragons. In the United States, imitation currently takes the form of impersonation, as President Trump stated in a press conference “we took something that was broken and we made it the model”, referring to South Korean policy against coronavirus (and more specifically about testing). In Germany, the Ministry of the Interior produced a steering document in which the use of smartphone geolocation data is deemed “inevitable in the long run”. In France, President Macron created the Care (Comité analyse recherche et expertise) to steer measures against coronavirus. Among the stated missions: “advising the government on backtracking practices”. And justifying ex-ante any backtracking policies soon to be activated?
But data surveillance is nothing new. What is new is quite new is deep learning on top of all the data. Seven years have passed since the Snowden revelations, and it seems like a step forward in Orwellian dystopia is needed to trigger a civic reaction.
Western democracies are ready to go forward imitating data surveillance, but they do not have yet the deep learning capabilities others might have. “Others” does not mean the Dragons. “Others” means mainland China. Because obviously, the management of COVID-19 in China is also a stately success. As Kai-Fu Lee remarks in the essay AI-Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order, the time when western governments looked down on China for its copycats and imitations is by now gone. Imitation seems to have switched sides.
For China heavily relied on its surveillance system based on AI to curb the epidemic. The capabilities of this system include an estimated 200 millions cameras, expected to quadruple by end of 2020. These cameras are powered by facial recognition algorithms, eating on the massive user data generated by Chinese services, and in particular by the BAT. “BAT” does not refer to one of the two species (the other being the pangolin) suspected to be the intermediate hosts of the virus. You know: bats have fangs, but more importantly BAT (short for Baidu Alibaba Tencent) are the FANG (Facebook Amazon Netflix Google) of China. They know all online and offline activity of users. On top of which, their payment apps are ubiquitous, and access to their databases is not ruled by strong privacy laws.
All this surveillance data is meant to converge by the end of 2020 into a nationwide system called Social credit. Social credit has exactly the same purpose as credit scoring in the US: it aims at qualifying trustworthiness of citizens, based on data. Data is not limited to financial data, and trustworthiness is not limited to the ability to get loans. Social credit aims at creating model citizens, as any antisocial behavior will be observed by an AI, and punished whenever appropriate. Social credit just pushed the rhetorics of Credit rating much further than plain imitation.
In this context, one can consider the whole coronavirus scenario as a dress rehearsal for the future social credit system and its underlying AI systems.
“The imitation game” is an AI test conceptualized back in 1950 by Alan Turing, the mathematician considered to be the founder of the theory of computer science, briefly mentioned earlier. The imitation game aims at defining the threshold at which an AI becomes indistinguishable from a human. Currently, advanced AI can be cornered in the imitation game by their lack of creativity. Deep learning is still “narrow AI”, meaning the machine does not know better than optimizing for a specific outcome (example: display the article that will trigger the most clicks for this user), even if it can now add several layers of abstraction for defining a complex outcome (such as: drive the car to destination). In other words: AIs know correlations, not critical thinking nor philosophy. In the case of a virus, AIs can optimize against a policy, not decide the policy. AIs can drive us towards Scylla or Charybdis, but the philosophical decision between Scylla and Charybdis has to be taken by humans. The philosophical process for choosing belongs to the political realm. The creation of a vision belongs to the political realm. AI should be considered for what it is: a weapon in the hands of the authority, not the mastermind in the plot (no Skynet scenario yet).
What is the vision western politicians are aiming at in the face of the outbreak? Different values and different societies mean they cannot blindly imitate policies designed in China. But ever since the reign of the Reagan / Thatcher couple, western politicians have been used to limit their role to the optimization of numerical outcomes (maximizing GDP, minimizing budget deficit, and now minimizing COVID-19 casualties). In the age of AIs playing the imitation game, optimization is not a role for humans anymore. If they want to distinguish themselves from machines, western politicians should start standing for their own political philosophies.
The Discreet Charm of the Authority
What exactly defines political philosophies in western societies today? Whether in old Europe or in the Americas, the common ground is a balance between two radical and often antagonistic rights (liberty and equality). Whether the weight carries towards one or the other is culture-specific, and one’s personal inclination will bring him the tag right- or left-winger. What is common to all western republics and monarchies though, is that these rights are anchored in the systemic design of the law. And western societies pride themselves in never compromising with the law, which is not a universal trait.
But all systems have flaws. For those who believe that proper design can set in stone the ideology underlying a system, here is a little tale.
A few weeks ago, I was informed that an effort to build a backtracking app was starting. It would leverage a technology I contributed to. At its core, this technology has been built to ensure privacy, decentralization and trust. The tracing app, called Coalition, would operate within the boundaries of the EU’s General Data Privacy Regulation and California Consumer Privacy Act. Since then, Apple and Google also communicated about an effort relying on a very similar design. It relies on activating BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) on your smartphone. Your device will then exchange anonymous IDs (random strings of characters) with nearby devices, and store these “contact IDs” in the memory of the device. Whenever a user of the app is tests positive for COVID-19, they will signal the network by sending their random IDs. Each device on the network can then continually compare “infected IDs” with its own “contact IDs”. If some of these IDs match, the user can go to and request the COVID-19 test. Beyond Coalition and the Apple-Google alliance, the French government is working with a consortium of corporates (including Orange, Dassault and Capgemini, whose track record with privacy and decentralisation is yet to be proven) on a stopCovid app, that would allegedly follow the same principles.
Is that reasonable? Academic studies, among which a study by Oxford researcher published in Science, or Stanford’s own app Covid-watch yet relying on the same principles, highlight that the efficiency of such apps rely on a massive 60% minimum adoption. In Singapore, adoption for a similar app peaked at 19%. At least 20% of adults are not equipped with BLE-enabled smartphones. Among them, mainly the elderly, the primary victims of COVID-19. All remaining users would have to voluntarily turn to a monopolistic system that would need to build its user base gradually and survive the first COVID-19 outbreak, so that it can be operational… for the next outbreak.
On top of which, BLE could not give any context beyond proximity and trigger many false positives. Efficiency of such a scheme is far from being proven.
On the other hand, a geolocation system, even a privacy-friendly one, still does its bit in the general scheme of surveillance. If at later times, for yet another type of state of emergency, a government were to deploy a fleet of BLE-enabled beacons exchanging anonymous IDs with the smartphones of the citizens, access to this repository of data would allow to track far more detailed geolocation than telecom operator metadata. In the meantime, citizens will have become accustomed to trading a bit more surveillance for a very incertain bit of additional security. And we have not even mentioned potential government backdoors.
Alternately, a tracing app could work without geolocation : you go to your doctor for a screening test. You test negative. You are delivered a certificate, valid only for a few days. You can again access your favorite social club (because you have one, obviously).
Considering inequalities of access towards testing and treatment, widely discussed above, such an app would obviously trigger even more social exclusion, effectively quarantining society members with less access to healthcare. Which would only reinforce the natural amount of “social distancing” — formerly known under the less flattering term “promiscuity” — guaranteed by design by the neighborhood and accommodation you live in. In Germany, such certificates will be implemented in April. This could be counterbalanced by requisition of unused spaces, lofts and luxury hotels in the crowded heart of metropolis for quarantine. But it is unlikely to happen as it hasn’t so far. Indeed, in France, even the 4,000 beds in private hospitals were not requisitioned by end of March, despite the call of their own federation for the government to do so.
Alternately, wealthy workplaces could demand you wear a device that tracks your vital signs. Privacy laws such as GDPR and CCPA are rather vague on how “consent” should be obtained. In the case described in this Tiktok video, “consent” means extortion: in China, the only way to exit the airport was giving all required tracking consent, along with installing dedicated apps. After which (this is not stated in the video) different authorities (a city, province or community ; private companies such as Alipay and Tencent, two of the “bats” we mentioned earlier) have different policies for delivering certificates of health (for example, the number of quarantine days can vary). If you do watch the video, I suggest you also look at the comments. A significant number of their authors state they would rather live in a safe place like China. Which subtly drives us back to political philosophy.
Comments on a twitter post are not statistically significant, but the poll made in France on March 21st is. It indicates that only 65% of the French declare themselves against state surveillance of digital data. Down from 75% just one week before. How low will it fall before confinement is over?
Two waves are simultaneously forming: defiance from part of the population as the outbreak brings inequalities on stage. And acceptance for large scale surveillance, as an acceptable tradeoff for health security.
Does the tradeoff seem familiar? “Health security” is just one tentacle of the security kraken who has been unfolding since the start of the Holy War on Terror. As we became accustomed to increasingly stringent airport security and “random” search, or soldiers armed with assault rifles in the street, we might become accustomed to Cerberus devices checking your temperature before unlocking doors. Or to promptly run in confinement each time a new outbreak threatens.
In France, a dedicated law was passed to grant a legal base to the state of health emergency. Debates in the Parliament were quickly moved aside: no “rigidities” were to be accepted when confronted with a pandemic outbreak. Hence, the government can unilaterally declare the State of Health Emergency, without referring to Parliament. An amendment timidly ruled that the scientific grounds should be justified. Such a law is the perfect weapon to harness the power of two waves at once. What could possibly happen next fall, when the government will get back at work and try to promulgate the tumultuous pensions reform? Nationwide outbreaks will repeat. But what if the protests were to coincide with a new outbreak of the epidemic, likely to happen with the seasonal comeback of the cold? Will the state of health emergency at once be unilaterally pronounced? I hear you backfiring my own argument: correlation is not causation… And correlation cannot be established with one event.
Would that event be unheard of in France? In the book “Un Président ne devrait pas dire ça…”, former President François Hollande unashamedly confirms that the State of Emergency was purposefully used to prohibit ecologists protests during COP21. Current President Emmanuel Macron was already part of the government, as Minister of the Economy. Correlations…
But it does not matter. There is a reason why it is called a State of emergency. All this is temporary.
Or is it? After a while, measures adopted during a State of Emergency tend to become permanent. The current government passed a bill on October 17th 2017 establishing permanent security measures within the law. Among others: the police can now start perquisitions or house arrests without judicial authority. No need to convoke Montesquieu to smell a curious cooking in the fundamental separation of powers in the governance.
And no need to convoke Foucault to understand that the Discipline and Punish part of the health emergency (or, in contemporary terms: surveillance and control) is a bit overplayed. Circulation papers, and a hundred thousand police officers (that’s one policeman for every seven hundred citizens) deployed in the streets of France to control and give fines to citizens who dare venturing out without written authorization? Could this army not be deployed instead to ensure the distribution and recollection of screening tests to laboratories for example? Couldn’t the population be trusted to react according to their own safety, as is the case in Sweden? The eyesight of ravaged supermarkets, online and offline, and hundreds of thousands of Parisians fleeing the capital could have been an argument against trustworthiness in France… if the chaos had happened before the inconsistent cavalcade of conflicting discourses and measures displayed by the government.
Setting aside the authoritarian details of the state of Health Emergency, and centering again on its enactment in the law: without control by the Parliament, are there any safeguards against a totalitarian drift? Is it just detail? Another state of health emergency was declared inside the European Union on March 30th. Only details separate the Hungarian version of the state of emergency from the French copy. Among the details: there is no time limit for the state of health emergency. According to the very definition of the word, Prime Minister Viktor Orban managed to create the first indisputable dictatorship inside the European Union. “Indisputable” as opposed to the debates triggered by Amnesty International reports denouncing severe degradations of human rights for years, particularly in France.
When first discovering the premises of the social credit in China, European audiences were not long in recognizing a confounding mix of the dystopian regimes described by writers from the early XXth century: Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984, and the inspiration for both: Zamyatin’s We. A mainstream audience discovered the theme with dismay and shock through an episode from the third season of the series Black Mirror as soon as 2016. But in 2020, tracking programs are publicly unveiled in France, Italy, Israel, Russia. In the US, the government is reconsidering its stance towards the startup Clearview AI, the creepy startup scraping the public Internet to create a repository of identities. The voice of whistleblower Edward Snowden, warning that surveillance measures will outlast the outbreak, doesn’t seem to resonate. Taking a step back, and despite the 2013 revelations (which still haven’t granted him a safe harbor from American pursuit in any European country), and until proven otherwise, we live in a democracy. We are not China, I’m told. China is not a democracy: there are no elections.
Except this very statement is wrong. As wrong as stating, for example, that the United States of America is not a democracy, because there has been suspected foul play in the 2016 elections, through alleged Russian interference and the whole Cambridge Analytica scandal. Democracy means the power comes from the people, it does not mean election. In that regard, understanding the political system in place in China is fundamental. At the core of the system devised by Deng Xiaoping and started during the Beijing Spring in 1977, there is a meritocracy. The pyramidal bodies constituting the government are built, from the ground up, through open examinations and peer reviews, much like the governance of modern business corporations. This process rules advancement up to the highest-ranking bodies. The shift of power is ensured through rotations and term limits, resulting in a turnover rate of the Central Committee far higher than the one in US Congress (For a general introduction to China’s political system, read Peter B. Walker’s Powerful, Different, Equal: Overcoming the Misconceptions and Differences Between China and the U.S.). The term limit for the President is two shifts, meaning ten years. Or… it was, until the term limit was abolished two years ago. China is now closer to a totalitarian than it ever was since 1977. At the beginning of the outbreak, whistleblower doctor Li Wenliang, who first raised the alarm, was arrested and silenced, and ultimately died of coronavirus. The ensuing outcry on social platforms such as Weibo and Wechat was methodically suppressed. Uighurs re-education camps, social credit, Hong Kong protests are also part of this shift in power towards authority.
So why the long digression? Because the point remains: the political system does not inherently make China a dictatorship. But the country is dangerously drifting towards an authoritarian regime. The same goes in the west: a political system is not enough to guarantee democracy. Vigilance is required. And authority has been a worldwide trend for the past twenty years at least. The twenty years that constituted the XXIst century until now. For the particular case of France, in his essay Récidives, 1938 (the French “récidive” means relapse or recidivism), the philosopher Michael Foessel draws attention to the striking similarities in the speeches, the media and the political landscape between the years 1938 and 2018.
Of course, each culture produces its own flavor of authority. Consider how a portion of the French society received confinement measures: popularity for French President, French Premier ministre and French Ministry of Health took more than ten points in the month of March, despite the wanderings we showcased in terms of health policy (screening tests and masks), security (deployment of drones and 100,000 police officers without any protection to enforce confinement) and inequalities (class confinement, economic measures already taken). A policeman in the countryside told a friend of mine they were overwhelmed with denunciation from neighbors for breaking confinement. Reading answers to the tweet from the police authority unveiling confinement, a significant answer whinge in advance: Parians would have no civic-mindedness and are not to be trusted; one of the early posts laments over homeless people “happily drinking together in the sun, listening to music”. Families confined in their country house record (disastrous) songs with the hashtag #resteChezToi(#StayHome), filming themselves happily doing some gardening, and asking others to do the same.
Does that ring a bell? “Collabos” (world war II nickname for people who collaborated with the German authority during the occupation) might be the force word that comes to mind. Collaboration is arguably among the worst behavior the French civilization showcased in the past hundred years. I think each civilization has in itself the potential for the best and the worst, and the worst can occasionally surface under tough circumstances. Knowing and being conscious of what the worst our culture produced in the past is a great asset when it comes to identifying dangerous emergent trends of the moment. No need to make explicit what is the worst a number of our western civilizations created in the past century. It must be enough to ask for vigilance. And remind that this “worst” was always escorted by a surge in authority.
But then, what is the driving force for such authority? It is temporally correlated with the expansion of neoliberalism (or free market liberalism), but is there really a connection? Let it be sufficient to mention that along the new silk roads of the BRI (Belts and Roads Initiative), technologies are also circulating from China towards its economic partners, including this: a proposal to shift the core protocol defining Internet architecture, TCP/IP, towards something allowing more control. Prophecies of Lawrence Lessig are turning true: in cyberspace, the age of merchants modified the architecture of the Internet. The age of government is yet to come. Authority, neoliberalism and new technologies flow in the same direction nowadays.
Let us use a sordid synecdoche to illustrate the argument. We have been discussing the role of the gig economy (companies such as Uber and Deliveroo, replacing permanent contracts with freelancers, now facing the crisis stripped of any social welfare) in the coming social crisis. In the US, in China and in SouthEast Asia, the leading ride-hailing companies are called Uber, Didi Chuxing and Grab. The three are heavily financed (about 8B$ for Uber, 12B$ for Didi, 3B$ for Grab) by the same venture capital fund, the Vision Fund (consequently, Uber and Didi competition for the Chinese market stopped). In 2018, worldwide outcry accompanied the sordid assassination of Jamak Khashoggi, and affected the cloud of numerous Silicon Valley startups, until then presented as ethical models throughout the world. The assassination was allegedly ordered by Saudi Arabia. The petrodollars from Saudi Arabia financed 45B$ of the Vision fund. Petrodollar, neoliberalism, inequalities, authority: the ingredients are the same as for the COVID-19 crisis.
Again, correlation is not causation. How does authority interact with markets and startups that better resonate with a liberal or even libertarian ideology? The answer might again come from AI, machine learning and optimisation. Inside the neoliberal ideology, the market should be free. The government should not intervene. It should not drive vision. Its role is to ensure the market is free and thus creates the conditions to run towards an optimum. Optimum is the very promise of AI, in many aspects of society: smart traffic lights in populated cities will optimize the flow of vehicles, while self-driving cars with a hive mind will decongest city centers. Smart fridges, retail shops and robot-pluckers will work together to optimize organic food supply chains from the field to your plate. AI insurance brokers will make perfectly informed decisions to minimize defaults and frauds. But optimization is a mathematical process that requires standardization and predictability. For that grand AI vision finally fulfilling neoliberalist utopia, all pieces of human consumption, human behavior, human life must be translated into uniform data. Hence: optimization requires monitoring.
But China does not harness AI for the sake of it. China harnesses the power of AI to drive its own vision, which in a few decades, drew nine hundred million people out of poverty. When in a neoliberal economy, the government does not have vision anymore, and just regulates the market, for the sake of the market. And the market, now in charge of managing AIs, will demand better monitoring, for the sake of better controlling the inputs and in the outputs of an optimized society. Better monitoring, more surveillance, less individual freedom, in the name of the free market. Just one more control mechanism towards authority.
This story continues on: Conclusion: Twelve Monkeys
