Geoffrey Cain — “The Perfect Police State”

An interview with reporter Geoffrey Cain, author of The Perfect Police State, an essential read on the Uyghur genocide, the tech dystopia in China, and its dangers for the entire world.

Hello! And welcome to the ScienceBorg Librarian. My name is Vasile Decu, I’m a science journalist, amateur astronomer and professional bookworm. And this is my book talk blog, where you’re invited to read (and soon listen to) interesting conversations with some of the best authors of nonfiction books, from media to tech, history and nature.

If you’ll enjoy this interview, please buy me a coffee and/or a chapter of a new and bloody expensive hardcover, via Buy Me a Coffee or Donorbox.

Geoffrey Cain is not only one of my favorite authors, he’s one of the best journalists out there — and his two books, Samsung Rising and especially The Perfect Police State, are must-reads if you want to understand the (tech) world. I know this term, ‘must-read’, is painfully overused, but I mean it in its original, literal sense.
We also had a great, hour long talk about the history of Samsung’s rising as a tech giant. Do check it out!

Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech (Bookshop.org / Amazon)
The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China’s Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future (Bookshop.org / Amazon)
(I get a huge commission of 1 or 2 bucks if you buy them through these links, which I’ll use for more books and coffee — ok, a chapter and a sip)

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The interview took place on August 2nd 2021 (but it’s still painfully relevant) and the text is slightly edited, in order to try to adapt it to ‘print’, from an online video talk. Any mistake or awkwardness of style comes solely from me — and my English as a fourth language.

Vasile Decu: I was asking you last time, in our interview for Samsung Rising, how hard was to research the history of such a big company. But how hard was it for you now, to research this book, about such a huge level of repression?

Geoffrey Cain: Good question. I mean, I could get so far into that, but… Interestingly, I would say that my current book, The Perfect Police State, was actually easier to research than Samsung Rising. It’s ironic, kind of strange. You’d think that it would be the opposite. But the reason this book was easier to research was because when I started working on it, that’s when a lot of the first Uyghur refugees were leaving China and going to Turkey, and Europe, Germany, Holland, also the UAE was a destination, Egypt. Uyghur refugees were spreading around the world and they had experienced all this suffering. They had been through such terrible events in their lives and they were ready to tell the stories. So I think I started at just the right timing, when they were ready to come out and to show what was happening.

And then, on top of that, it was also easier to research because there were other journalists who were also researching the topic. There were quite a few, maybe a dozen people, who were all piecing together their own refugee testimony and who were gathering documentation. They were gathering satellite imagery, and corporate reports, and official Chinese government documents, and Chinese language news. They were gathering a body of evidence that showed what was happening. And so I came in at a time when this picture was still being put together. In the case of Samsung Rising, no one had really done that before. It was pretty much me and maybe one other writer who is Korean, who’s actually written deep work on Samsung. Whereas when it comes to the Uyghurs, it’s a major topic, with major significance for the world. And so a lot of people are researching it right now. It’s not just me.

Then let me somehow rephrase my question. How hard and how important was it this time to protect your sources? Because a Samsung employee may lose her job. One of your sources for your current book may lose her life.

Yes, that was the biggest challenge in writing this book, that I had to find ways to protect my sources. I set up a cyber security system, so none of the documentation from the book, none of the interviews, none of them exist on the cloud or on any computer anywhere. They only exist on a super secure drive that I have, that’s encrypted. It has a giant password and only I have access to it. It’s locked away in a safe. And so, when it comes to the data for the book, there’s simply no chance that anyone in the Chinese intelligence services can get to that. Unless, of course, they break into my safe, break into my house, but they don’t even know where I live because I’ve taken all that down. I used to live in D.C., but I now live in a more secret location that I’ve never revealed. On top of that, I did a lot to withhold the identifying information of the sources and many interviews we even decided not to use at all, because just some of the material, the interviews, would reveal people’s identities. So every single interview in here, it got the approval of the sources who are being published about, you know, they all read this book. They all read what was being said about them. And they felt comfortable with this level, with this amount of information being published, if they were anonymous. So, you know, we’re confident that the people who I interviewed are overseas and they’re safe. And they’ve also taken measures on their own to protect their own identities, to ensure that their families are safe back in China, that they can’t be found.

Did you follow what happened to them or to the very large Uyghur diaspora in Turkey after you finished writing the book?

There have been some people who have been deported back to China. Turkey is the one country that’s a Muslim majority country that is still hosting the Uyghur refugees. The Turkish government has said that they are going to keep them in Turkey. The Chinese government says that it has ratified a treaty against them, that will have these refugees sent back. But, so far, Turkey has remained generally strong about not wanting to repatriate the Uyghurs back to China. Pretty much every other Middle Eastern country has bowed down to China. The UAE, Egypt, Iran I’ve heard, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, a lot of these countries have caved in to Chinese pressure, even though publicly they might speak up against the treatment of the Uyghurs and of the Kazakhs. But, you know, they still harass dissidents and they harass refugees on their own territory. One of the decent things about doing this research in Turkey is that the Uyghur issue is not considered a highly sensitive topic in Turkey by the government or by regular people. It’s generally something that has the support of the Erdogan government. I do know that the US State Department speaks with the Erdogan government about this Uyghur topic. And they’re trying to apply pressure just to be sure that they’re not sent back. But if they are sent back, that would be a major political blow to the Erdogan government, because they claim that they are the guardians of the Turkic peoples and that they’re not going to, you know, betray that confidence.

You’ve been writing about technology for so many years, and, as you said in another interview, you’ve been to a lot of places that have dictators and violence — from Myanmar to North Korea. But the ‘Situation’ in Xinjiang, as it is known, seems an entirely different, dystopian world…

That’s why I wrote the book, because I went to Xinjiang and I saw just the intensity of the technological surveillance that existed there. You know, I was shocked that this was not happening in a futuristic novel. This wasn’t happening in George Orwell’s 1984 or The Minority Report by Philip K. Dick. This was actually a real life surveillance dystopia. Really, the biggest comparison is Minority Report, because in Xinjiang they even run a ‘precrime’ system in which an artificial intelligence software program gathers vast data on every citizen, every resident, and tries to predict their behavior. And then if it ‘predicts’ that they will commit an act of terrorism in the future or a crime, the police, the special forces will be sent in, and they’ll often be taken away to a concentration camp, without even being charged with a crime. So, you know, that’s essentially the plot line of Minority Report. In this case, obviously, the government is not accurate in its predictions and it’s pretty much scooping up everyone it can. Anyone. It’s 10 percent of the population that’s being put in concentration camps. This is the largest internment of ethnic minorities since the Holocaust, since World War Two with the Nazi Germans. But the difference is that this is not a situation where… There are no death camps, no gas chambers. This is something different altogether, because it’s a quiet extermination of a group. It’s much quieter than it was in the past. And it usually involves the use of… The government forces people, women to take contraceptives to sterilize themselves so they can’t have children. And it also tries to erase the identity and the culture of a people, so they’re not allowed to speak their own language. They’re forced to do this identity wipe. To forget who they are, where they come from. And that’s really the goal. It’s to assimilate all these people, to become the majority group, the Han Chinese.

Maysem, the main figure in your book, has a really great quote in a page, an entire page of dialog. She quotes from 1984 and then she adds that the difference now is technology, which makes it even worse than “1984”. These technology companies are not neutral and are doing this willingly and knowingly, in China and now even abroad. As arms of the Chinese state.

Yeah, they are. Chinese technology companies are doing this willingly. They will deny it publicly. They say that they are not involved in the Uyghur situation and the crimes against the Uyghurs. But then why is it that, for example, Huawei helped develop and test a Uyghur alarm that was going to be deployed against Uyghurs, that you could recognize them from a camera? There are all these different software programs that were being developed by these companies and then they try to deny that they had any involvement. And the reason they deny it is because they’re going to get hit by sanctions by the European Union and the US. They’re already being hit hard by sanctions. And it just means that they’re going to suffer more for human rights violations on the global market. But the thing that we have to remember is that under Chinese law, there is no separation of powers. It’s simply that the Communist Party is the highest authority and everyone is required under Chinese law to assist the state in intelligence investigations and national security concerns. You know, this was part of a series of laws that have been passed over the past decade, the national security law, the national intelligence law. And so if the Chinese Communist Party or the police, the Public Security Bureau, or any intelligence body, the state security bureau, if they were to tell a company such as Huawei or a company such as Tencent, which runs WeChat, these are major global corporations… And they are pretty much, in effect, forced to cooperate with the Chinese government whenever it wants to gather information on people. That’s a very dangerous prospect, because that means that everyone around the world, in any country, could be subject to Chinese surveillance through their smartphones if they’re using, say, WeChat. And, you know, I’ve tried calling the Xinjiang region using WeChat. And sometimes I get a notice and it’ll say that “Your communications might not be private”. When you call certain parts of China that are sensitive, you often get a notice. And it’s just a warning like this. “We can’t guarantee that your data is not being collected, that you might be being watched and this might be being monitored and put into a government system somewhere.” These companies… The thing is that they willingly and knowingly have gotten involved. And, at the same time, the way the system is set up is that if they don’t get involved, then their business is going to suffer, the Chinese government’s going to retaliate against them. This is the big problem that we have today in China, that the state and the companies are fundamentally inseparable and that we have even reached a stage in the globalization of our economy in which foreign companies that want to do business in China are finding that they’re running into the same problem, that if they somehow criticize the government or resist what the government wants, that their business in China will suffer at the hands of the government, that they will be retaliated against. And I fear that China has worked itself into a position in which the world economy and manufacturing is so dependent on it that simply the world cannot negotiate. The world is not in a position to resist it that easily. The world is in a position in which human rights are always going to be secondary to the trade. We thought that trade would bring democratic values to the world, that Russia and China and all these other places, like Turkey, would adopt the values of democracy if they saw the power of the capitalist market. But now we are seeing the reverse. We’re seeing that the capitalist market has been adopted worldwide without the values of democracy.

These are not neutral companies, they are very much aligned with the goals of the Chinese Communist Party. They will deny this publicly. But, you know, I’ve interviewed executives at Huawei and other companies who say internally how they have discussions about the importance of being aligned with the Chinese Communist Party, that that is their sovereign. There’s no separation. There’s very little separation between what Huawei will be doing and what the Chinese government will be doing anywhere in the world. A lot of what Huawei does is subsidized by the government. The government encourages it to export its products, to export its 5G. And we’ve also seen that when it comes to 5G data networks, the Chinese government retaliates and threatens sovereign independent nations that decide not to use a Chinese network.

“The Perfect Police State”… Sometimes, publishers like to exaggerate in their titles and subtitles of the book. But the extraordinary stories you’ve documented and shared in the book show that this title is no metaphor at all. The thing that you’re describing in the book, the “Situation”, is an unimaginable (for us) police state. A panopticon of horrors.

It is the perfect police state and I chose the title because I thought it reflected the true reality of what’s going on. I thought it was the closest label I could get to… The most accurate that I could get of all the options available. the title was actually my idea, and the subtitle was thought up by my editor. We both contributed to that one.

The Panopticon is a system, it’s a circular prison, a concept invented by Jeremy Bentham, who was a British philosopher in the 18th century. Originally, it was meant to control workers, factory workers, to make sure that they were on time working, and then it was later expanded to control prisoners. The idea is that there’s a circular prison and there are all these cells on the outside circle. So there’s an inside circle that’s a guard, a sentry post, looking out at all the workers or the prisoners and just making sure that they’re staying in line. So what effect this has is that the prisoners on the outside circle can’t see the guard on the inside. They know that they are being watched, but they’re just not sure when and where. I mean, it could be that the guard in the center is simply taking a nap. It could be that he’s watching one prisoner. Maybe he’s watching a group of prisoners in one area. Maybe he might even have binoculars or a video camera. And he can look really closely, but we’re not totally sure. And this has the chilling effect of getting everyone in line, everyone in order, because the feeling of being watched is just as powerful as the certainty of being watched. Being uncertain is often better than being scared, when it comes to controlling a population. And so the Uyghurs I interviewed tell that this is what the Chinese government has set up in Xinjiang. They think that the Chinese government has set up a system in which no one knows for sure whether it works that well. No one knows for sure whether it’s actually gathering good data and whether it knows who’s a ‘criminal’ or not. But the point of the system is that that’s all shrouded in secrecy. And so the government can say “we have this big artificial intelligence system that’s monitoring you”. And what that means is that everyone is not sure where the line is. It’s a riddle and the riddle is ‘what is acceptable and what is not’. Where is that line drawn? And the government will take away people. It’ll swoop in and it’ll arrest people for, you know, just tiny infractions: if they change their habit of what time they wake up one day, or if they go to work late a few times. This is ‘evidence’. If they go home and walk in through the back door, instead of the front door. The A.I. will decide suddenly that this is evidence that something has changed in their lives, that there’s some kind of disorder and they need to be swept up and taken to a camp. So, you know, how can you know that? If you’re an Uyghur person, the only way you can really defend against this is by living your life the exact same every day and by controlling your thoughts, monitoring your own thoughts, shutting down your identity and just becoming a zombie who just follows the same routine. Doesn’t go on vacation, doesn’t watch too much TV, doesn’t say anything against the government. You really have to become a robot to survive. And so that’s what’s gotten people in line in Xinjiang, it’s that they’re under a panopticon and they don’t know if they’re going to be taken away next. It could be them, it could be their best friend, it could be a distant relative. But whatever happens they need to just keep their heads down and just be, just do whatever they can to erase their thinking. Don’t think, don’t speak, just be a robot. That’s how you survive.

Their stories contain a lot of horrible instances not just of physical violence… but the idea of a camera in your living room, of everything that you do being monitored — and I mean everything! Some people (idiots) would say that this is a problem of a bunch of Muslims in a corner of China. But, actually, it’s a global problem because what happens there is truly awful and can be replicated, and probably will.

Yes, exactly, there are people who say, oh, this is only a limited problem in one region of China, we don’t need to worry about it. And sometimes they also say that, oh, this is exaggerated. And, you know, we’ve heard that before. I mean, we’ve heard that in the history of authoritarian regimes with Holodomor in Ukraine, also with Ceaușescu in Romania. There’s a long history in Cambodia, with the Khmer Rouge. There’s a long history of people around the world saying that it’s never that bad. And then they discover how bad it was when the regime collapses and they go in and get into the archives and see how vast the police state was and the executions and the terror that exists. So I think that Xinjiang is in a similar situation right now. There are so many people around the world who, for whatever reason, they see, they think that, you know, you can’t criticize it. They have this strange view of the world. ‘OK, you can criticize police brutality in America, but then you should not criticize police brutality in China’, something like, you know, a messed up view. You have to criticize one country, but you’re not allowed to criticize another government. It’s like you have to stay stuck on one.

And these tactics, these technological strategies are already being replicated. The Chinese government has been rolling out social credit and similar AI systems nationwide. This is something that has been spreading all over China. It’s been in Tibet, Inner Mongolia, also the major cities, Shanghai and Beijing. Even Han Chinese people now are being taken to concentration camps and the Han Chinese are the majority group. These major companies, that make the facial recognition and voice recognition software, they are, with the encouragement of the government, exporting these same surveillance technologies around the world, especially to some authoritarian regimes. That’s a major problem. These technologies are being exported, but at a pace that we can’t quite understand how they’re being used yet. Some governments even admit that they’re using them for surveillance, to go after the opposition. You know, there was one case in Uganda where it turned out that Huawei equipment was used to go after the political opposition to hack their phones and hack their data. And there was one episode in Uzbekistan where the government said it was going to digitally manage political affairs, which is an Orwellian way of saying that they’re going to spy on people, spy on their citizens. This is one of the big challenges of the world, because what China has developed… it really is the perfect police state. It’s the perfect system for authoritarianism and for getting a population under control and governments around the world that are authoritarian they’re going to want this technology. It’s going to be extremely valuable to them and they’re already adopting it.

BBC: Satellite images show rapid construction of camps in Xinjiang, like this one near Dabancheng

On one page, Maysem says that when cameras started appearing everywhere, too many people went along with it. And it’s a scary thing to read and hear, because we’re also doing this now. I know our governments are not the Chinese dictatorship, but I can’t help seeing parallels. How much should we fear this?

Yeah, I think that everyone should fear this. It’s a lot of data that can be put by both corporations and the government to use for whatever reason they want. And we have to remember that when these cameras on the streets were first sold to us by our governments and our police departments, they sold these cameras to us as, you know, just a solution for mainly crimes on the streets and also for driving, that it would just keep our driving in order. But what always happens, there’s a mission creep. You know, the system starts to expand and then the authorities will almost always say, like, well, we have these cameras here already, why don’t we use them for something else, too? When government bureaucrats are given the authority to surveil, what bureaucrats need is data. And, of course, what they’re going to do is just look for ways to gather more; more and more accurate data. Just to know about people. It’s the tendency of the state to want to know about its population. It’s just the habit. It’s natural. It’s the nature of the government. But we don’t know, if we go ten years in the future, how are these cameras going to be used? Are they going to be used simply to fight crime or more? How out of control is this going to get? And is it simply going to be that we’re constantly being monitored and watched?

A lot of Western companies actually say that privacy is holding us back. “Look, the Chinese are jumping ahead and we need to gather all the data that we can in our society just to keep up with or to fight against the evil Chinese giants.”

I think that’s complete propaganda; that’s propaganda that the Western companies put out because data means profits for them. That’s how they sell ads. We have to remember that Facebook and Amazon and Google, these are not revolutionary companies that are, you know, they’re not changing the world for the better. These are, at the fundamental level, advertising companies. These are business executives who sell commercials to people. And so I think that when we think, when we put it in that context, you know, things change. I’m not going to give an advertiser my data. I don’t think anyone should hand over their data voluntarily to somebody who’s simply advertising to them. Maybe just reasonable amounts of data, like for a census. In the US, we have the census every 10 years. And a lot of that is reasonable, because the government in that case, a democratic government that’s democratically elected, is gathering information about how many bedrooms you have, how many people live in the house, you know, the electrical system, the sewage system. And they gather this sort of data because this is public works data that they can use to improve public services. Where is the population shifting, where is a growing, where is it shrinking. Where do we need to build more schools. Where do we need to build more sewage systems. Where do we need to send more buses and that sort of thing. You know, should we build a subway line here? Using data for simple public works is not a problem at all. But the problem is that these are private companies who have their own profit interests, that are not looking out for the safety and health of a nation. They’re interested in buying ads. They’re not interested in beating China. If they were interested in beating China, then they would not be in the Chinese market right now. They would not be kissing China’s ass, bending over and making China feel good about itself. So I think it’s a deep hypocrisy. And I think that regular citizens should do everything they can to fight Western companies that want to take their data.

And I think complying with what China wants (info on dissidents, censorship, etc), will make these companies also accept it from our own governments.

When it comes to the intelligence agencies, one of the problems is that after 9/11, the US set up a secret court called the FISA court, the Foreign Intelligence Service Act, I think. This is a secret court that convenes and that allows intelligence agencies to surveil people. What can they do that’s legal and what can they do that’s not legal. The biggest problem, fundamentally, is a transparency problem. I think that it’s very difficult in a democracy to justify a federal court operating in secret under the grounds of national security. Obviously, you know, the intelligence services can’t tell everything to the public. There are some secrets that they do need to keep because they need to protect their sources around the world. But in a democracy, they still need to keep the public generally informed about what they’re doing and what’s going on. I would be in favor of abolishing the FISA court and maybe setting up a new system of courts, decentralized courts. Not just one court that decides everything, but a series of appeals in which the public can actually petition against intelligence agencies or law enforcement at a court if they suspect that there is something amiss or something that violates their civil liberties going on. And the thing is that, when it comes to the FISA court in particular, regular citizens have no way of knowing anything that’s going on. And also I think that intelligence agencies should be forced to go through regular courts, too, if they just want to justify what they’re doing. If they’re sued by a citizens group or sued by civil society, they should have to answer in a transparent court and reveal what it is that their citizens are concerned about.

Maybe we will not get a camera in our living rooms, but we should also fight against the data that’s being funnelled through our phones.

Even Zoom is controlled by a Chinese company. There were some employees who were arrested in the US for leaking Zoom data to Chinese intelligence. You never know who’s watching. You never know who’s listening. We’re at a stage now where I don’t think we even need government cameras in our living rooms. You know, that is already an outdated relic. Our smartphones, our laptops, our smartwatches, our TVs. All of this can easily be hacked and data could be gathered on us. That’s the world we live in.

Thinking about China, I bet you are on its blacklist.

Probably, yeah, I haven’t heard from China yet, but I have a housemate when I’m down in Washington, D.C., and after my book was published, he started getting all these random, strange WhatsApp messages from beautiful Chinese women who they all say that they’re in Ontario, Canada, and they want to meet him and go on dates and they want to learn about things. Obviously, this is what happens when you know somebody who’s working on deep China issues. The Chinese intelligence services do target people with these silly schemes where they have fake profiles contacting you. And it’s always a beautiful woman, you know, who wants to meet, to gather data. That is not a conspiracy theory. That is a fact. This is what they do. There was even an American lawmaker from San Francisco, I forgot his name, but about a year or two ago, he was actually found to be hanging out with a beautiful Chinese spy in California. He won’t say clearly whether he slept with her, which I think is enough evidence that he slept with her. And, you know, that’s a huge compromise of our national security against China. So….

Because it’s really effective, unfortunately.

Yeah.

I am reading now Catherine Belton’s incredible history of Putin’s rise and she’s also having a lot of problems with Russia and its oligarchs abroad. But I was thinking, OK, Russia is pretty wild. There’s the possibility of violence, but you can escape. China may prove to be a tougher prison for its people through the use of technology.

Oh, yes, without a doubt. 10 years ago or 20 years ago, there was that question over which nation would move ahead. Would it be Russia or China? And some people actually thought that Russia would rejuvenate one day, that it would become a major industrial power. But it’s clearly China — and also India. There were the BRICS — China, Russia, India, Brazil. And it’s become absolutely clear now that China has eclipsed all of them and that China is so far ahead of all these major nations in terms of its technology and industry and manufacturing. So yes, when it comes to Russia, the Russian government is known to employ much more aggressive kind of upfront tactics against journalists and activists and dissidents. I mean, their agents actually go to the UK and go to Europe and poison people. The Russian oligarchs and the kleptocrats, they will use the courts in the West to bully and harass people with lawsuits. China usually does not employ these strategies. The Chinese government tries to stay a bit more hidden. I mean, that’s not to say the Chinese government doesn’t threaten people. But they’re smarter in how they deal with these things, because they know that… You know, if Huawei were to sue a journalist in a European or American court somewhere, what that means is that it would have to reveal secrets in courts. The judge will say, OK, well, you have a case that you’re bringing forward. So let me see what you’re doing in Xinjiang, you can reveal all your emails, your internal documents, and we’ll decide whether this is libel against you. China doesn’t want that. They don’t want anything to be seen. They want all of this to be kept secret. And anything that exposes what’s happening inside China or what’s happening inside Xinjiang is deeply sensitive. China wants to be seen as a prestigious, developed country. It doesn’t want to be seen like Russia. Russia has the image now of the bully. But China wants to protect its image.

A dissident in Russia may get a bullet, but you can still say probably fuck Putin to your friends and in your home. But it’s getting almost impossible to do that in China because, as you say, tech it’s inescapable and it has a very sinister efficiency.

Yes, I think you just said it right. I would describe the Chinese system as more efficient. Russian authoritarianism is too loud. The world sees it. And there’s NATO, there’s the US. There are all these organizations that their sole purpose is to resist Russian foreign policy around the world, especially in East Europe and Central Asia. But when it comes to China, the system is so much more efficient because, with technology, all this happens so much more quietly. There are no bullets, very few bullets. There’s no radiation poisoning of dissidents in England. It’s a smarter system. But, also, China relies on the fact that the world is so globalized now and so many people and companies depend on access to China, that often they don’t even need to take action. It’s just the threat that if you’re an American company in China, you might have your assets seized by the government if you say something against China, that’s what keeps people on their toes.

And the million dollar question… How can we, as a society and as people, defend against dangerous uses of tech?

This is always the hard question. So the thing is that tech is developing at such a fast pace that whatever we do now will be obsolete in six months. And that’s the problem. For regular people, I would just recommend taking basic steps to get a Proton mail account, which is encrypted, to get a password manager, that’ll set long, long, complicated passwords for you. Use a good firewall for your internet. You know, these are basic steps that everyone can do for pretty cheap and they really do raise your protection level by a huge level. I mean, they’re not going to hold off a Chinese cyber attack. If the Chinese military decides to target you, they’ll still be able to break in. But when it comes to regular everyday threats of hackers and identity theft and viruses, this will protect you from what most people have to deal with.

But on a national level, you know, I think governments need to pass stronger laws that will require companies to be transparent about what do they trade with China. What do they trade with Russia. Or even what do they trade with European Union countries. It doesn’t have to be an authoritarian country, but what is passing across borders?
And also how does AI work? Most companies don’t want to reveal how their A.I. works because it’s a corporate secret. I think that since A.I. has a massive impact on the public good now, governments should pass stronger laws that require companies to disclose the workings of A.I. without disclosing the deep, deep secrets that would make it unprofitable, that don’t need to be known by the public. There’s some stuff that doesn’t need to be known because it’s just so arcane and so technical. But the general workings of what’s happening here needs to be put out there, to regular people.

I must say that the first three pages of your book are some of the best pages in the last few years of tech and nonfiction writing.

Thank you, I appreciate that. I was in China, in Xinjiang in December 2017. And the thing is that 2017 was really the last year that anyone could go there without getting kicked out. That was when the ‘situation’ started getting far worse. It’s very difficult to do anything there anymore. I would estimate that the situation is a lot worse now. Whatever I was writing about, it’s probably dated already. And there’s something far more terrifying there that we haven’t even documented yet. There’s also often a lag. So it takes about six months to a year for information to get out of Xinjiang. And that’s what’s worrisome. I just wonder, you know, a year from now, are we going to hear about an even stronger, more monstrous creation of artificial intelligence, that’s putting even more people in camps? I just hope it doesn’t get way worse, for the sake of humanity.

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