AIHow an “AI-tocracy” Emerges
Many scholars, analysts, and other observers have suggested that resistance to innovation is an Achilles’ heel of authoritarian regimes. But in China, the use of AI-driven facial recognition helps the regime repress dissent while enhancing the technology, researchers report.
Many scholars, analysts, and other observers have suggested that resistance to innovation is an Achilles’ heel of authoritarian regimes. Such governments can fail to keep up with technological changes that help their opponents; they may also, by stifling rights, inhibit innovative economic activity and weaken the long-term condition of the country.
But a new study co-led by an MIT professor suggests something quite different. In China, the research finds, the government has increasingly deployed AI-driven facial-recognition technology to suppress dissent; has been successful at limiting protest; and in the process, has spurred the development of better AI-based facial-recognition tools and other forms of software.
“What we found is that in regions of China where there is more unrest, that leads to greater government procurement of facial-recognition AI, subsequently, by local government units such as municipal police departments,” says MIT economist Martin Beraja, who is co-author of a new paper detailing the findings.
What follows, as the paper notes, is that “AI innovation entrenches the regime, and the regime’s investment in AI for political control stimulates further frontier innovation.”
The scholars call this state of affairs an “AI-tocracy,” describing the connected cycle in which increased deployment of the AI-driven technology quells dissent while also boosting the country’s innovation capacity.
The open-access paper, also called “AI-tocracy,” appears in the August issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The co-authors are Beraja, who is the Pentti Kouri Career Development Associate Professor of Economics at MIT; Andrew Kao, a doctoral candidate in economics at Harvard University; David Yang, a professor of economics at Harvard; and Noam Yuchtman, a professor of management at the London School of Economics.
To conduct the study, the scholars drew on multiple kinds of evidence spanning much of the last decade. To catalogue instances of political unrest in China, they used data from the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) Project, which records news feeds globally. The team turned up 9,267 incidents of unrest between 2014 and 2020.
The researchers then examined records of almost 3 million procurement contracts issued by the Chinese government between 2013 and 2019, from a database maintained by China’s Ministry of Finance. They found that local governments’ procurement of facial-recognition AI services and complementary public security tools — high-resolution video cameras — jumped significantly in the quarter following an episode of public unrest in that area.
