AI Surveillance and the Social Credit System | John Lennox

this is perhaps one of the scariest aspects of it what we're talking about here is facial recognition by closed circuit television well it starts with facial recognition but we've now got to the stage where in China in particular they can recognize you from the back by your gate by all kinds of things and what has happened is and you can see the positive benefit police want to arrest criminals or thugs or rowdies even in a football crowd and so using facial recognition technology they can pick a first note and arrest them or her well okay but what it can be used for good purposes in that sense in keeping Law and Order can also become particularly in an autocratic State a common instrument of control and here's the huge dilemma which people try to solve how much of your privacy are you prepared to sacrifice for security there's a tension between those two things now in China you mentioned and you're probably thinking about xinjiang where you've got a minority a Muslim minority of uyghur people the surveillance level on them is is unbelievable every few hundred meters down the street they have to stop they have to hand in their smartphones the smartphones are loaded with all kinds of stuff by the government their houses have QR codes outside them as to how many people live there and all this kind of thing and I don't know how many it's way over a million I believe are being held as a result of what is being picked up by artificial intelligence systems in re-education centers and the suspicion is that the the culture is being destroyed and eradicated that's the one hand that's in one particular Province but elsewhere in China we have now the social credit system that apparently will be ruled out in the entire country we're given say you and I were given to start with let's say 300 social credit points and were being trailed if we fail to put our rubbish trash can out at night there'll be marks against us if we go to summer dubious or mixed with someone who's political loyalties or suspect we'll get more negative points on the other hand if we pay our debts on time and go green so to speak and all this kind of thing we will amass more crevice points and then if we are going negative the penalties kick in we'll discover we can't get into our favorite restaurant we'll discover we don't get that promotion or don't even get that job we apply for or that we can't travel or that we can't even have a credit card and this is being ruled out and the list of penalties and and things that have actually been recorded is just very serious now what amazed me when I first came across this was the fact that many people welcomed us they think it's wonderful they're both I've got a thousand points so many of you got and they don't realize that the whole of life is becoming controlled in the interest ostensibly of having a healthy Society so it is talk about 1984. now this is not futuristic speculation this is already happening George Orwell you mentioned him he wrote 1984. he talked about Big Brother watching you and that technology would eventually it is doing it this is narrow AI this is not futuristic in any way it's what's actually happening at the moment and you mentioned briefly the fact that all this stuff exists in the West except and the point has been made forcibly it's not quite yet under one Central Authority and control but it is coming we have credit searches we have all kinds of stuff that is beginning to creep in in the US and in the UK and I presume also in Australia and also we have even police forces here I believe who want the whole caboodle in here and want to be able to exert a much more serious level of control and it is frightening because what it does for human rights is is well so so it occurs to me that you know I love history as I've mentioned authoritarian regimes have collapsed under their own weight typically the people have risen up one way or another and there's been an overturning we've never had autocratic regimes that have had this surveillance capacity there's you know an estimated 400 million pro-circuit television sets in China that that's one for about every three people I mean it's mind-boggling oh it is mind-boggling and even here in the UK what I'm told is that you're on a closed circuit TV Camera every five minutes when you're moving around so it is very serious and of course the irony is as I hinted at earlier here we are with our smartphones that have got all these capacities certainly at the Audio Level and we're voluntarily wearing them so we're voluntarily seeding part of our autonomy and our rights really to to these machines when we don't really know what has been done with all the information so we have a huge problem and someone has said we're sleepwalking into all of this so that we're captured by it we're imprisoned by it and we wake up too late because the central Authority has got so much control that we cannot Escape anymore [Music]

Channel: John Anderson

Views: 11,914

Keywords: John Anderson, John Anderson Conversation, Interview, John Anderson Interview, Policy debate, public policy, public debate, John Anderson Direct, Direct, Conversations

Id: evBcQQtF_e4

Length: 6min 50sec (410 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 22 2023