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Deep Learning 'Godfather' Yoshua Bengio Worries About China's Use of AI (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Yoshua Bengio, a Canadian computer scientist who helped pioneer the techniques underpinning much of the current excitement around artificial intelligence, is worried about China's use of AI for surveillance and political control. Bengio, who is also a co-founder of Montreal-based AI software company Element AI, said he was concerned about the technology he helped create being used for controlling people's behavior and influencing their minds. Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal, is considered one of the three "godfathers" of deep learning, along with Yann LeCun and Geoff Hinton. It's a technology that uses neural networks -- a kind of software loosely based on aspects of the human brain -- to make predictions based on data. It's responsible for recent advances in facial recognition, natural language processing, translation, and recommendation algorithms.
"This is the 1984 Big Brother scenario," he said in an interview. "I think it's becoming more and more scary." "The use of your face to track you should be highly regulated," Bengio said. The amount of data large tech companies control is also a concern. He said the creation of data trusts -- non-profit entities or legal frameworks under which people own their data and allow it be used only for certain purposes -- might be one solution. If a trust held enough data, it could negotiate better terms with big tech companies that needed it, he said Thursday during a talk at Amnesty International U.K.'s office in London. Bengio said there were many ways deep learning software could be used for good. In Thursday's talk, he unveiled a project he's working on that uses AI to create augmented reality images depicting what people's individual homes or neighborhoods might look like as the result of natural disasters spawned by climate change. But he said there was also a risk that the implementation of AI would cause job losses on a scale, and at a speed, that's different from what's happened with other technological innovations. He said governments needed to be proactive in thinking about these risks, including considering new ways to redistribute wealth within society.
"This is the 1984 Big Brother scenario," he said in an interview. "I think it's becoming more and more scary." "The use of your face to track you should be highly regulated," Bengio said. The amount of data large tech companies control is also a concern. He said the creation of data trusts -- non-profit entities or legal frameworks under which people own their data and allow it be used only for certain purposes -- might be one solution. If a trust held enough data, it could negotiate better terms with big tech companies that needed it, he said Thursday during a talk at Amnesty International U.K.'s office in London. Bengio said there were many ways deep learning software could be used for good. In Thursday's talk, he unveiled a project he's working on that uses AI to create augmented reality images depicting what people's individual homes or neighborhoods might look like as the result of natural disasters spawned by climate change. But he said there was also a risk that the implementation of AI would cause job losses on a scale, and at a speed, that's different from what's happened with other technological innovations. He said governments needed to be proactive in thinking about these risks, including considering new ways to redistribute wealth within society.
Face tracking is not the biggest threat. The biggest erosion of personal freedom in China is this one: WeChat Pay.
Why? Before the advent of WeChat and Alipay, China was mostly a cash based society, so the government had little knowledge of your payment transactions. Which is why China has to rely on state-owned enterprises for revenues, since there were no effective way to collect taxes from ordinary people and 95% of Chinese do not file a tax report.
Now, that's all changed: everything is paid via WeChat and Alipay, even pant handlers. So every transaction can be tracked, and taxed.
Of course, in the U.S., people have been on checks and credit cards for who knows how many decades. China is catching up fast on that front.
Indeed, you control a lot when you control all cash transactions. In the west, there is a least some privacy, even from governments. But in China they actually boast about how much they can help the government monitor people.
This then gets combined with complete control over all communications. That is where AI comes in. To monitor people's emails and worse phone calls is not practical to do except for specific suspects. But AI can do a lot of this automatically, particularly voice recognition. And mobile phones now give the government knowledge of where people are at all times. And then this vast amount of data can be correlated -- e.g. that two people in these groups lived near each other 20 years ago...
It would be very difficult to quietly organize any grass roots movement about anything in China today without approval from the government. There are some, e.g. people were complaining about some groups eating dogs. But anything to do with the government, like complaining about a school that collapased during an earthquake, is not possible.
Where it gets scary is that Xi Jinping is also talking about nationalism. He has the South China Sea. He wants Taiwan. And nobody on the ground nor in the citadel could stop him if he started doing crazy things.
History does not exactly repeat itself, but we do know what this type of thinking resulted in Germany in the 1930s. And Xi is far more entrenched in China than Hitler was before he invaded France. (Hitler faced substantial internal opposition before France.)