Dystopian Future: Through China’s AI Lens
By N. MacDonnell Ulsch, Contributing Author/ September 26, 2023
Mr. Ulsch is Founder and Chief Analyst of Gray Zone Research & Intelligence—China Series, a research initiative focused on unraveling China’s technology driven strategy of global economic supremacy. He is a well known international advisor on cybersecurity, operational risk, technology and geopolitical risk. He periodically advises the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on the China cyber and technology transfer threat. A former Senior Managing Director of PwC’s cybercrime practice, he has led incident investigations in 70 countries.
His research on the China threat covers the impact of legal and illegal technology transfer on China’s economic development strategy, US corporate regulatory risk pursuant to the China threat, China’s supply chain penetration, food processing and transport, technology investment, equity investment, Military-Civil Fusion as a cyber threat, and space-based revenue generating initiatives. More than 500 companies around the world read his LinkedIn China Polls, including every major bank in China.
His LinkedIn China Polls have received more than 200,000 views since June 2021 and he has more than 25,000 risk, audit, lawyers, and security followers on LinkedIn.
Mr. Ulsch is a strategy advisor to an East African presidential cabinet-in-exile on a counter-China Belt & Road Initiative, intended to increase the US presence and commitment to this transitioning nation-state.
Previously he was with the National Security Institute and under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act he served as a cyber threat advisor to the US Central Intelligence Agency. His work there involved developing perspective on key US cyber adversary capabilities and attacks on the US commercial sector and the Defense Industrial Base. He served on the US Secrecy Commission, and worked with a well known US Senator on information security issues. Mr. Ulsch advised a US presidential campaign on cybersecurity issues.
He is Guest Lecturer on Cyber Warfare at the US Military Academy at West Point. He has also lectured at numerous university graduate and law schools. One of his books, Cyber Threat!, is used in a number of universities and law schools. Mr. Ulsch is a Research Fellow in the Master’s in Cybersecurity program at Boston College, which he helped establish and where he remains on the advisory board.
Mr. Ulsch has spoken internationally at events and is the author of two books: Cyber Threat: How to Manage the Growing Risk of Cyber Attacks (John Wiley & Sons, 2014) and Threat! Managing Risk in a Hostile World (The IIA Research Foundation, 2008). For many years, Mr. Ulsch has been a Distinguished Fellow of the Ponemon Institute. He is a Director of the Near East Center for Strategic Engagement and Contributor to the inteliscopx.com program Homeland Security Off the Record. His videos are posted on YouTube and other social media venues.
Mr. Ulsch is an Independent Director of a financial services company, serving on the audit and risk committee, with particular focus on cybersecurity and privacy issues.
Adapted from his forthcoming book, THREAT!.CN—China’s Relentless Fight for the Future
Nightmarish Plans
What nightmarish plans might the Chinese Communist Party have in mind for AI in the future? You can bet it includes China’s capability to quell domestic threats and to build its strategic coalition of geopolitical and economic partnerships among developed and developing nations around the world.
We don’t have to look far to envision China’s grotesque use of AI, though. It is happening right now, under our noses. Just look at its repression of its Uyghur population through advanced technology and AI. China uses AI predictive algorithms in deploying its predictive policing program.
As a leader in an allied nation-state government said to me recently, “we can’t really control what goes on domestically in China.” I said that I agreed with him. “But did you know that China is exporting this same technology as part of its Smart City development program?” No, he did not. That changed the conversation.
The Dark Side
The dark side of China’s strategic technology development, acquisition, and engagement is manifested in its repression of its Uyghur population, resident in China’s Western Xinjiang region since about the ninth century. China’s repression of the Uyghurs is built upon a quasi-scientific premise. China has architected a system built upon intelligence collection, population monitoring, and invasive surveillance. China has positioned the program as central to its domestic tranquility agenda. But the dark side is best defined as China’s use of artificial intelligence to create convenient, if false, conclusions through a program known as predictive policing. The result is that more than a million Uyghurs have been detained, confined to so-called re-education camps, some tortured, raped, others abused and even killed. But this is not the worst of it. China is now exporting this perversion of predictive algorithmic technology.
Let’s examine how China configures its predictive false narrative. Imagine a society in which:
Every targeted individual’s conversation is recorded and compiled in a target database;
Every in-person meeting is noted;
Every text message is tracked and recorded;
Every organization a target individual belongs to is recorded;
Every letter written is tracked;
Every camera on every street records vehicular and human foot traffic;
Every telephone call is monitored and recorded;
Every book purchased or checked from the library is recorded;
Every publication subscription is noted and archived; and
Every financial transaction and expenditure is recorded.
This is China’s strategy for religious and ethnic persecution. Intelligence collection, monitoring (systematic, continual, active or passive observation) and surveillance (targeted monitoring for the identification of evidence of crimes).
Just the Beginning and Not Enough
Intelligence collection, monitoring, and surveillance is just the beginning. Every target has a massive, detailed, in-depth, analytical profile. The government’s intent, under the jurisdiction of the federal police force, the Department of Public Security, (DPS) is to gather as much information on each target as technically possible. This is a critical element of government control under the guise of what China calls “Domestic Tranquility.” Domestic Tranquility is important not only as a mechanism to control dissident population segments in the interests of law and order; it serves as a model for the export of Chinese technology and programs to nations overseas to repress their opposition.
But collecting and monitoring and surveillance is not enough to control dissident groups. This is where artificial intelligence plays a critical role. The key to targeted population control is how the massive data profiles of each targeted individual are manipulated. The DPS applies artificial intelligence algorithms to actually predict which crimes a targeted citizen will commit.
Predictive Policing
This is done under the auspices of what is known as predictive policing. Predictive policing is a legitimate form of law enforcement work. Traditionally, predictive policing, using historical and current data, subjected to artificial intelligence algorithms, can anticipate the possible change in criminal behavior based on many factors. For example, if a predictive analysis suggests that certain types of crime in certain community segments are likely to occur, representing a departure from the past, law enforcement can respond proactively. It could, for example, increase police presence in the identified areas. It could recommend community policing patrols to discourage crime.
Legitimate predictive policing can actually provide a benefit to the community through the anticipation of crime and its response to mitigate that change in criminal activity, which is the hallmark of predictive policing in the West. It is a proportionate response to changes in data collected and analyzed in the pursuit of traditional justice, but which integrates the use of technology to increase the effectiveness of law enforcement.
Highly Charged and Politicized Action
This is not the Chinese government version of predictive policing. The predictive algorithms developed in China, and used by the government, are used to build a case that a selected, targeted dissident, for example, is going to commit a specific crime against the state. This is presented as factual evidence of criminality. So, predictive policing, as embraced by the Chinese Communist Party, is a highly charged and politicized action resulting in the imprisonment of its victims. When arrested, the targeted individuals are sent to what are called “re-education camps.” However, these camps have been likened to prisons or concentration camps where detainees are consistently held against their will, physically and emotionally abused, sexually assaulted, have their organs harvested, and even killed.
According to Human Rights Watch, as of January 2021, 1.3 million Uyghurs have been detained in these camps as a result of China’s model of predictive policing.
Domestic Tranquility Agenda and International Ambitions
If the Chinese Communist Party’s actions in predictive policing through its DPS, in its pursuit of Domestic Tranquility were contained to mainland China, it would still be reprehensible. But its trail of persecution does not end at China’s borders. China’s Domestic Tranquility agenda is a predicate to its international ambitions. China’s path to becoming a global economic superpower is complex and wide-ranging. In essence, if China can demonstrate the power of an action at home, it gives credibility and credence to marketing that program overseas. By China’s definition, the persecution of its Uyghur population has been a demonstration of success.
Smart Cities Initiatives
“China has become a global leader in Smart Cities initiatives, combining embedded sensors, metering devices, cameras, and other monitoring technologies with big data processing and artificial intelligence (AI) analysis to help manage its cities and public spaces,” according to the Report on China’s Smart Cities Development. The report was prepared on behalf of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in January 2020.
New and Substantive Challenges
The report states that China believes it will win “the global race to building an intelligent and data-driven society.” It also notes that “China’s Smart Cities development poses new and substantive challenges to U.S. interests at home and abroad.” With equal emphasis, it may also be said that these actions by China pose “new and substantive challenges” to the West in general and to free people everywhere.
The report goes on to say that this initiative by China poses several threats. “Technologies that by definition capture and synthesize massive amounts of real-world data, real-time data on people’s daily lives can easily be deployed in a manner that threatens personal privacy or even national security.”
Magnitude of Smart Cities Initiatives
To illustrate the magnitude of Smart Cities initiatives, Chinese consulting firms placed the market value at about US $1.1 trillion in 2018 and projected compound annual growth of 33%. To put this in perspective, consider that China’s domestic mass surveillance program in 2019 had some 200 million monitoring CCTV cameras as part of the so-called “Skynet” system in mainland China. By 2020 it is believed that China had deployed some 626 million cameras. In addition, it is “widening adoption of artificial intelligence, and fundamentally nonexistent civil rights protections are laying the groundwork for a digital panopticon …”
According to the report, there are said to be 398 instances of 34 different Chinese companies exporting Smart City technologies and solutions through involvement in Smart City projects in 106 countries.
A More Sophisticated Approach
China does not market its AI-enabled intelligence collection, monitoring and surveillance system as a solution to persecute religious minorities or as a way to erase an entire ethnic culture. (Though that is the ultimate goal.) But China engages in a more sophisticated approach that resonates with its intended targets. Packaging this predatory predictive policing system as a technological response to increasing drug trafficking and controlling organized crime is gaining traction in international markets. As an element of a Smart City architecture, such predictive policing systems are perceived as a way to derail crime—before it strikes, in effect.
Massively Transformative Technological Revolution
In an era of massively transformative technological revolution, in which the pathway to the war machine of the future is enabled; all technology barriers between civilian business and the military are now being eliminated. Period. Every string of computer code: accessed by civilian business and the military. Every structured and unstructured AI program: equal access. Every academic institution, every research center, every think tank, every political initiative: commandeered to move in unison toward the same goal. It is a race to develop the next-generation socio-military architecture of geopolitical and economic command and control.
China will enable the most corrupt nations on earth to control their domestic populations through advanced technologies, including predictive policing, wherever Smart Cities are developing under China’s fierce and totalitarian management.
The implications here are enormous. Repressing a population is just the start. China will use AI to enhance the yield from farm animals and farms, food processing and distribution to the control of lithium, cobalt and nickel for its electronic vehicle battery development. China will intervene in the judicial systems of other countries through predictive policing. It will manipulate social media strategies and increase its use of disinformation campaigns across the face of the planet. It will reshape education. It will empower its military.
Without Consideration
And it will do this without consideration of the ethics and the dangers of AI. The Chinese Communist Party is not well known as an enabler of humanity. It is all about China—at any cost. If we fear the development of AI without consideration of consequence, then consider China and its development plans for AI. And here is the most frightening aspect of AI development: our allies, from South Korea to the European Union—as well as the United States—are helping China envision and develop its AI future.
That is scary as hell!