philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

How an “AI-tocracy” emerges

In China, the use of AI-driven facial recognition helps the regime repress dissent while enhancing the technology, researchers report. ...

In China, the research finds, the government has increasingly deployed AI-driven facial-recognition technology to surpress dissent; has been successful at limiting protest; and in the process, has spurred the development of better AI-based facial-recognition tools and other forms of software. ...

What follows, as the paper notes, is that “AI innovation entrenches the regime, and the regime’s investment in AI for political control stimulates further frontier innovation.” ...

The open-access paper, also called “AI-tocracy,” appears in the August issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics.  ...

Such data — from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology — also indicates that AI-driven tools are not necessarily “crowding out” other kinds of high-tech innovation. ...

“This is an excellent and important paper that improves our understanding of the interaction between technology, economic success, and political power,” says Avi Goldfarb, the Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare and a professor of marketing at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. “The paper documents a positive feedback loop between the use of AI facial-recognition technology to monitor suppress local unrest in China and the development and training of AI models. This paper is pioneering research in AI and political economy. As AI diffuses, I expect this research area to grow in importance.” ...

See the full story here: https://news.mit.edu/2023/how-ai-tocracy-emerges-0713