[Cacti]

During the mid GOP primaries, Trump was starting to pull ahead, to the disbelief of nearly everyone. Newt Gingrich was on TV at that point and asked about the likelihood of Trump actually capturing the nomination, and he said, I think very astutely, "well, who is going to stop him?"

The same lesson applies here in terms of the nightmare of a surveillance that China is building out today: who is going to stop them? The people don't have the legal ability to do much about it, and have few individual rights, so there is almost no political or legal barrier here for China's government to do whatever it wants with its people. There is no real economic barrier any more because their economy is simply too large and, dare I say, diversified. There is no real technological barrier either on the hardware side or the software side, nor are the costs particularly prohibitive. China's neighbors are no real barrier either since they have little comparable military strength (short of US involvement and a general world war), and they all depend too much on China's economy anyway. And "the West" can't do much except scream and shout for much of the same reasons.

In short, there is really nothing that is stopping the Chinese government from rolling out the first, real, honest-to-god, 1984-style police surveillance state, and the potential capabilities are, frankly, terrifying. Those not involved in machine learning these days may not be able to appreciate it, but the tech is there for pretty much anything you can think of (as far as wide scale automated surveillance, tracking, etc. right down to the individual level at nearly every minute of the day at nearly any point in the country). It exists _already_, it's just a matter of investment capability and political will to make it happen, and China has both of those in spades.

We're talking surveillance of the individual via face tracking, but we're also talking about gait tracking, the tracking of facial expressions (and inference from there to emotion and thoughts), of eye tracking, picking up on little hesitations in body language, of the ability to tracking individuals vehicles, of tracking people as they enter a subway and then exit somewhere else entirely, of tracking of every financial transaction, of your network and cell usage, your power usage. Cameras, drones, and whatever else that will have the resolution to pick up on the text of what you're reading and carrying, of little patterns of evidence on your person. THe amount of enthusiasm you express at a political event or public sports event. Not just the content of your voice, but the tone, and what can be inferred from that. What you're reading, what you're clicking on, how long your mouse hovers over an image. And in all of these things, new inferences will be able to be made that weren't possible before, like estimates on your inner thought process, of intent, of you're long-term threat or lack thereof, all the things that you can currently hide away in private.

It's fucking crazy, and the tech for it, at least at the fundamental level, it's already here.

China will be the first state in history to actually pull off an actual 1984-style surveillance state, and to the detriment of every normal person there, and the eventual determinant to billions more once they start normalizing and exporting it.

[duxup]

The question also is... can they feed all the data they get into an intelligence system that allows them to do the same in other countries?

As they profile everyone in China, can they do the same elsewhere?

The sheer amount of data, poorly protected, or just up for sale data out there in other countries make it seem like they could do the same for "everyone else" just to perhaps a lesser extent.

Perhaps a requirement for even doing business with China would be participating ....

[Cacti]

It's a good question, and the answer is very likely "yes". I have no doubt they will be to export these systems to other politically- or economically- or militarily- friendly countries, once they've developed the datasets and trained the models and such.

They could probably even do it as a lease, and keep the most important stuff (key parts of algorithms, training datasets) at home--Surveillance As A Service!

ANd yes, if their economic continues to grow like this, your observation is a great one--there wouldn't be much stopping them from requiring participation in such leases as a condition on economic or military support.

[jononor]

Economic sanctions might have an effect. But the western world is pretty high on manufactured-in-China goodies right now, so this might be hard to pull off. And a lot of the powers-that-be in US and Europe are basically drooling, more interested in implementing something similar to China that to fight it.

[ilaksh]

I believe that it is much worse than that. Much of the same capabilities are available to the US government now. And unfortunately some aspects of western governments (i.e. intelligence) are just as interested in and subscribed to total surveillance as China. And also unfortunately many Americans have accepted this surveillance under the belief that it is there for their own protection against "terrorists". The government has access to Facebook and Google.

[Cacti]

The US, despite all its flaws, still has legal and political structures to prevent the worst abuses. Not all, and not for everyone, but in general people do have actual, real rights. Say what you will about the US political process, but if push comes to shove and millions of people hit the streets, changes _will_ happen.

Someday that may not be true. It's very likely the US eventually devolves into a real surveillance-police state of the type we are talking about here, but it is still quite a ways off. And, frankly, there is not much incentive for the US government to really push the envelope so long as the country is stable and rich. If that situation changes, then yeah, the US could devour itself from within in order to prop itself up, but again, that is quite a ways off.

For the Chinese government, none of these barriers exist. Hell, there is barely the concept of individuals rights in the first place.