How an “AI-tocracy” Emerges

Given that Chinese government officials were clearly responding to public dissent activities by ramping up on facial-recognition technology, the researchers then examined a follow-up question: Did this approach work to suppress dissent?

The scholars believe that it did, although as they note in the paper, they “cannot directly estimate the effect” of the technology on political unrest. But as one way of getting at that question, they studied the relationship between weather and political unrest in different areas of China. Certain weather conditions are conducive to political unrest. But in prefectures in China that had already invested heavily in facial-recognition technology, such weather conditions are less conducive to unrest compared to prefectures that had not made the same investments.

In so doing, the researchers also accounted for issues such as whether or not greater relative wealth levels in some areas might have produced larger investments in AI-driven technologies regardless of protest patterns. However, the scholars still reached the same conclusion: Facial-recognition technology was being deployed in response to past protests, and then reducing further protest levels.

“It suggests that the technology is effective in chilling unrest,” Beraja says.

Finally, the research team studied the effects of increased AI demand on China’s technology sector and found the government’s greater use of facial-recognition tools appears to be driving the country’s tech sector forward. For instance, firms that are granted procurement contracts for facial-recognition technologies subsequently produce about 49 percent more software products in the two years after gaining the government contract than they had beforehand.

“We examine if this leads to greater innovation by facial-recognition AI firms, and indeed it does,” Beraja says.

Such data — from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology — also indicates that AI-driven tools are not necessarily “crowding out” other kinds of high-tech innovation.

Adding it all up, the case of China indicates how autocratic governments can potentially reach a near-equilibrium state in which their political power is enhanced, rather than upended, when they harness technological advances.

“In this age of AI, when the technologies not only generate growth but are also technologies of repression, they can be very useful” to authoritarian regimes, Beraja says.

The finding also bears on larger questions about forms of government and economic growth. A significant body of scholarly research shows that rights-granting democratic institutions do generate greater economic growth over time, in part by creating better conditions for technological innovation. Beraja notes that the current study does not contradict those earlier findings, but in examining the effects of AI in use, it does identify one avenue through which authoritarian governments can generate more growth than they otherwise would have.

“This may lead to cases where more autocratic institutions develop side by side with growth,” Beraja adds.

Other experts in the societal applications of AI say the paper makes a valuable contribution to the field.

“This is an excellent and important paper that improves our understanding of the interaction between technology, economic success, and political power,” says Avi Goldfarb, the Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare and a professor of marketing at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. “The paper documents a positive feedback loop between the use of AI facial-recognition technology to monitor suppress local unrest in China and the development and training of AI models. This paper is pioneering research in AI and political economy. As AI diffuses, I expect this research area to grow in importance.”

For their part, the scholars are continuing to work on related aspects of this issue. One forthcoming paper of theirs examines the extent to which China is exporting advanced facial-recognition technologies around the world — highlighting a mechanism through which government repression could grow globally.

Peter Dizikes is the social sciences, business, and humanities writer at the MIT News Office. The article is reprinted with permission of MIT News.