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Why Dictators Fear Artificial Intelligence
At first glance, it would seem that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a technology dictatorships, autocracies, would embrace, and they are in many ways, as AI evolves, they may well be more afraid of it than one might think. Why? What does this mean for democracies and the geopolitics of AI?
China has some of the best privacy laws in the world. Or so it would seem. On the surface this would seem as if they do care about their citizens personal data. What they’re actually designed to do is mitigate the collection of citizen information by foreign governments.
While we don’t have any conclusive and direct evidence that China is collecting citizen intelligence on Western democracies, anecdotal evidence does suggest this. Such data would be harvested by foreign governments for several reasons. One of them to understand how people behave for what today is called influence activities, formerly psychological warfare.
There is evidence that both China and Russia have tried to interfere with American, Canadian and British elections. Russia regularly carries out such activities against NATO countries close to its border like Latvia, Estonia and Poland.
Autocracies saw the danger of social media in a connected population in 2011 with the uprisings of the Arab Spring. From then on, they have moved…
