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4 Mar, 8 tweets, 3 min read
1/ With AI, China’s government could soon achieve an unprecedented political stronghold on more than 1 billion people, @andersen reports. (From 2020) theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
2/ The emergence of an AI-powered authoritarian bloc led by China could warp the geopolitics of this century. It could prevent billions of people, across large swaths of the globe, from ever securing any measure of political freedom. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
3/ The Uighur population has already been denied such freedom.

In 2014, more than 1 million Uighurs were forced into concentration camps. Those who were spared the camps now make up the most intensely surveilled population on Earth.
4/ China is an ideal setting for an experiment in total surveillance. Its population is extremely online. Until recently, it was difficult to imagine how China could integrate all of its data into a single surveillance system, but no longer.
5/ In the decades to come, these systems may even be able to read unspoken thoughts. Server farms across China will soon be able to hold multiple angles of high-definition footage of every moment of every Chinese person’s life. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
6/ That’s why China’s ascent to AI supremacy is such a menacing prospect: The country’s political structure encourages, rather than restrains, this technology’s worst uses. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
7/ Regardless of potential American intervention, only China’s citizens can stop this. Wresting power from a government that so thoroughly controls the information environment will be difficult, but much of the planet’s political trajectory depends on it. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
8/8 Otherwise, by 2030, AI supremacy might be within range for China. The country will likely have the world’s largest economy, and new money to spend on AI applications for its military. AI could upturn the global balance of power. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

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28 Feb
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11 Dec 20
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