Beijing — After years of phenomenal growth, China’s security and surveillance industry is now focused on plugging its vulnerabilities to the United States and other external factors, concerned about the risks posed by hackers, advances in artificial intelligence and pressure from rival governments.
A renewed emphasis on self-reliance, combating fraud and toughening systems against hacking was highlighted at the recent Security China exhibition in Beijing, showing how difficult it will be for Beijing and Washington to cooperate, while researchers warn that Mankind is faced with common threats. from AI. The show comes days after China’s ruling Communist Party warned authorities about the risks posed by artificial intelligence.
The emphasis on the four-day meeting: China’s biggest geopolitical rival, the United States. The US-developed AI chatbot ChatGPT was a frequent topic of conversation, as were US efforts to block China’s access to cutting-edge technology.
“There is a great potential danger in this new technology,” said Fan Weicheng, director of Tsinghua University’s Public Security Research Center. He clicked through a presentation of an AI-generated figure of Barack Obama speaking, illustrating the risks of misleading images and videos that can now be created digitally.
“The United States has a national security strategy for the 21st century. Russia has a national security strategy. Germany has a strategy. So what about Japan,” Fan said. “We are working on it in China as well.”
Chinese academics, Fan says, are working on an “early warning system” to identify and manage potentially disruptive technology, creating indices and formulas to measure the impact of emerging technology on China’s national security. Can
Over the past decade, China’s AI technology has made rapid strides, partly in collaboration with US research institutes and tech firms. Like the US, Chinese leaders are concerned about advances in artificial intelligence.
But there’s an additional challenge. As geopolitical tensions have peaked in recent years, Washington has moved to cut off China’s access to US technology — pushing Chinese tech firms toward self-sufficiency.
Comments from a meeting last month chaired by Chinese leader Xi Jinping urged a renewed focus on the potential risks from new technologies.
“The complexity and seriousness of the national security problems faced by our country have increased dramatically,” the official Xinhua news agency said in a readout about the meeting. “We must be prepared for worst-case scenarios and extreme situations.”
Visitors to the exhibition said China needs to develop locally manufactured products and become self-sufficient, keeping an eye on new developments coming from the West.
“This is the AI era. The future has arrived,” said Liu Caixia, director of a Chinese police research institute. “People in academia are feeling scared.”
“We’ve seen in some sci-fi blockbusters, only intelligent machines are left in the world, and humans are kept like pets,” Liu said. “What kind of attitude should we adopt to deal with this?”
Liu’s answer was clear and in line with China’s determination to lead cutting-edge technologies: go ahead, and deploy AI in new areas.
But it also reflects a contradiction between China’s technology ambitions and deep concerns about the potential social and political risks of such technologies. Tech firms in China have approached chatbots like ChatGPT with caution, for example, because of heavy censorship that does not allow AI to generate politically sensitive content.
But ChatGPT begs the question: Should China rush to embrace AI and possibly suffer its pitfalls, or err on the side of caution and risk falling behind the United States?
Across the Pacific, US tech executives and policy makers are grappling with similar questions. Waves of US sanctions have targeted Chinese chip makers and AI companies in a bid to restrict access to Beijing’s cutting-edge technology. Politicians are worried about the growing prominence of China in the region.
With Sino-US friction at a boiling point, Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Beijing this week to stabilize relations, seeking to reassure Chinese counterparts that Washington was not alienating China – only “risking to reduce and diversify”.
Although both sides declared the visit a success, Beijing expressed frustration with the US sanctions, with Wang Yi, China’s top foreign affairs official, calling on the US to “give up stifling China’s technological development”.
Some experts believe that cooperation, not conflict, is necessary to combat what threatens all of humanity. Earlier this month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman dialed into a conference hosted by the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence to encourage collaboration between Chinese and American researchers to reduce the risks of AI.
“The stakes have never been higher for international collaboration,” Altman said, noting that China was home to some of the world’s top AI researchers. “We must manage the risk together.”
Such concerns were mirrored at the conference in China, where officials expressed concern about the potential for use of AI-generated voice and imagery in fraud, hacking and misinformation campaigns.
“The potential for fraud is very high,” said Li Congting, chief AI scientist at video surveillance maker Uniview. “Many people have already messed with ChatGPT. Everyone thinks its ability to interact is really cool, like there’s a real person behind it.
Scientists and tech industry leaders in the US, including high-level executives from Microsoft and Google, recently warned about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence.
Several Chinese researchers echoed those concerns. But there was little talk of cooperation with the United States at the Beijing Expo.
“Technology innovation has become the main battleground of international geopolitics,” said Gao Lei, a top official at a state-owned enterprise managed by China’s Ministry of Public Security. The US has “stepped up its suppression” of China’s tech industry, Gao said, adding that it was “imperative” to replace US technology with local computer chips.
Although both countries are grappling with concerns about AI, the stark difference in their approaches to the technology makes cooperation difficult.
China has built one of the most intrusive digital surveillance systems in the world, covering city streets and rural villages with cameras and tracking citizens via chat apps and mobile phones.
The US government has sanctioned several Chinese tech companies for their role in Beijing’s high-tech crackdown on China’s far west Xinjiang region, where digital technology was used to arrest ethnic minorities.
Several companies were approved at the expo, including telecoms giant Huawei, camera maker Hikvision and surveillance specialist Mia Pico. A representative for Meia Pico declined an interview with the AP, citing a complete ban on speaking with foreign media.
The use of policing technology in the US is constrained by civil society and legal challenges. But that hasn’t stopped many from deploying suspected privacy-violating technology, including facial recognition and predictive policing, feeding accusations of hypocrisy and fueling suspicions in China that US sanctions are politically motivated .
Meanwhile, Chinese companies are continuing to deploy the technology in ways that are of concern to Western lawmakers.
At the conference, a China Mobile researcher discussed the drones his company was providing to the Hong Kong police. The researcher said they were used to monitor protesters during the 2019 anti-government protests. Advances in 5G telecommunications technology mean that officers no longer need to operate drones in the field, but can do so from the comfort of their offices.
“With the click of a mouse, they can get drone footage from the area sent to their computers,” said researcher Su Yu. “It improves efficiency.”
With tensions at an all-time high, experts say, it remains an open question whether the two countries can find a way to work together.
“How do the US and China co-exist with such radically different norms around the use of technology and society?” said Sam Sachs, a senior fellow at Yale Law School who studies Chinese tech policy. “We have to find a way forward. It will not be easy to do politically.
