AIDe-Risking Authoritarian AI
You may not be interested in artificial intelligence, but it is interested in you. AI-enabled systems make many invisible decisions affecting our health, safety and wealth. They shape what we see, think, feel and choose, they calculate our access to financial benefits as well as our transgressions. In a technology-enabled world, opportunities for remote, large-scale foreign interference, espionage and sabotage —via internet and software updates—exist at a ‘scale and reach that is unprecedented’.
You may not be interested in artificial intelligence, but it is interested in you. Today, you might have used AI to find the quickest route to a meeting through peak-hour traffic and, while you used an AI-enabled search to find a decent podcast, driver-assist AI might have applied the brakes just before you back-ended the car in front, which braked suddenly for the speed camera attached to AI-controlled traffic lights. In the aftermath, AI might have helped diagnose your detached retina and recalculated your safe-driving no-claim bonus.
So, what’s the problem?
The problem—outlined in my new report released by ASPI today—is that AI-enabled systems make many invisible decisions affecting our health, safety and wealth. They shape what we see, think, feel and choose, they calculate our access to financial benefits as well as our transgressions, and now they can generate complex text, images and code just as a human can, but much faster.
It’s unsurprising that moves are afoot across democracies to regulate AI’s impact on our individual rights and economic security, notably in the European Union.
But if we’re wary about AI, we should be even more circumspect about AI-enabled products and services from authoritarian countries that share neither our values nor our interests. The People’s Republic of China is an authoritarian power hostile to the rules-based international order that routinely uses technology to strengthen its own political and social stability at the expense of individual rights. In contrast to other authoritarian countries, such as Russia, Iran and North Korea, China is a technology superpower with global capacity and ambitions and is a major exporter of effective, cost-competitive AI-enabled technology.
In a technology-enabled world, opportunities for remote, large-scale foreign interference, espionage and sabotage —via internet and software updates—exist at a ‘scale and reach that is unprecedented’. AI-enabled industrial and consumer goods and services are embedded in our homes, workplaces and essential services. More and more, we trust them to operate as advertised, to always be there for us and to keep our secrets.
Notwithstanding the honorable intentions of individual vendors of Chinese AI-enabled products and services, they are subject to direction from PRC security and intelligence agencies. So democracies need to ask themselves, against the background of growing strategic competition with China, how much risk they are prepared to bear. Three kinds of Chinese AI-enabled technology require scrutiny:
