We Have Been Harmonised

Home > Other > We Have Been Harmonised > Page 16
We Have Been Harmonised Page 16

by Kai Strittmatter


  Delegates also heard Vaughan Smith, the Facebook vice-president responsible for AI, introducing his platform (banned in China) to the audience. Smith was eager to assure his listeners, many of whom would be unfamiliar with Facebook, that, like all other technology, artificial intelligence would bring good things – and that in the Facebook laboratories, at least, they were ‘having a blast’.

  He underpinned his optimism with examples from Facebook’s own AI research. Currently, they excelled at getting information from machines to people; the new challenge was how to transfer information from human brains to the machines. A brain produces one terabyte of data every second, the equivalent of 40 to 50 feature films shot in HD, said Smith. The big question is – how do you stream that data from living brains into whirring hard drives? At least, that is the question at Facebook, where according to Smith they are working day and night to find an answer.

  If I understood Smith correctly, Facebook is doing all this with the noble aim of creating a world in which a person suffering from complete paralysis could operate a keyboard using just their mind and write 100 words a minute. Unfortunately, said Smith, the man on the street often had entirely the wrong idea about AI research, which was one of the reasons that the general tone of the debate was so anxious. He went on to report proudly on the project’s latest coup: a cap that uses lasers to read the neurons in the brain.

  A cap that can read your mind in real time, and siphon off all the films that play there into a machine? Isn’t this just the kind of Bond-villain-style device the man on the street imagines AI scientists to be inventing – and is understandably very anxious about. It didn’t seem to have occurred to Smith.

  The Chinese members of the audience listened intently. ‘We extend a warm welcome to the international companies and institutes here, and invite them to open offices here in China and share the results of their research with us,’ said Chen Zhaoxiong, deputy minister in the Ministry for Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), with disarming openness. Afterwards, representatives of Chinese industry presented their first AI successes. Lu Yimin, the president of China Unicom, one of the country’s two telecoms giants, said that the age of isolated islands of data was over: ‘In the future, we’ll have a central big-data platform.’ Having all the available information about each customer in one place – that was the way to follow through on the firm’s new motto: ‘Be a customer-friendly creator of smart living.’

  ‘Smart’ was also the key word for Robin Li, CEO of the search-engine company Baidu. In 2016, Baidu was hit by a scandal when it emerged that search results were being manipulated to the benefit of suspect advertising customers. Cancer patients in search of medical help were directed towards the website of a dubious group of clinics, and the death of a 21-year-old student with cancer triggered a debate about Baidu’s practices that went on for months. With state support, the company is now trying to reinvent itself as an AI business, taking Google as its role model. Cars, supermarkets, cities – all will be smart in the future. ‘No more traffic jams, and no environmental damage. In future, everyone will be relaxed and cheerful. We’re going to make people happier,’ Robin Li enthused. He closed by saying: ‘We need to inject artificial intelligence into every corner of human life.’

  And that is just what China is doing. Xi Jinping has called for his country to become the ‘world leader’ in AI as quickly as possible. Scientists must venture bravely out ‘into no man’s land’, so that China can also ‘occupy the commanding heights’ in the area of artificial intelligence.98 Barely a year after AlphaGo beat the South Korean Lee, and only two months after it beat China’s Ke Jie, China’s State Council published a ‘Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan’.99 It is an extraordinarily ambitious plan. Artificial intelligence, the authors write, will change human life and the face of the earth. AI has become ‘a new focus of international competition. AI is a strategic technology that will lead in the future’. AI will turn the commercial world on its head and become the new engine of economic development. And finally, AI holds unprecedented ‘new opportunities for social construction’, which is Party-speak for social control. An article in the Guangming Daily, the Party newspaper for intellectuals, described China’s power and wealth at the time when the peoples of the world still lived in agrarian societies. ‘But then our country missed out on the industrial revolution’ and fell behind the West. China is not about to make the same mistake with big data and AI: ‘Digitalisation has given the Chinese people the opportunity of the millennium.’100

  Various players in China, from private hi-tech companies and universities to cities, provincial governments, ministries, all the way to the military, had for some time been working on their own programmes in the fields of big data and AI. But the State Council’s plan hit them like a thunderbolt, and their efforts are now being combined and multiplied. By 2020, China aims to draw level with the ‘leading research nations’, meaning of course the USA. In 2025, China wants to achieve its own ‘important breakthroughs’ in AI research and use. And by 2030, Beijing wants China to be the only frontrunner and ‘the most important centre for AI innovation in the world’. At that point, according to the plan, the country’s AI industry should be worth the equivalent of £112 billion. As an added bonus, ‘public security’ will be more seamless than ever before, thanks to ‘intelligent surveillance, early-warning and control systems’. The plan calls for new ‘intelligent applications’ for the ‘management of society’, with the specific example of ‘video image analysis and identification technologies, biometric identification technologies, intelligent security and policing products’. As always in China, developments are coming thick and fast in the breathless rush to catch up and overtake.

  The eye of the dragonfly is made up of 28,000 facets, each of them a little eye in itself. Dragonflies have a 360-degree view of the world and can pick up images five to six times more quickly than humans. Dragonfly Eyes is the title of a feature film that I watched on an autumn day in 2017, in an artist’s studio in one of the faceless new estates north of Beijing’s fourth ring road. ‘I’ll tell you a secret,’ says a young man in the film. ‘I often watch you, on the monitor.’ Then, from off-screen, the narrator’s voice: ‘This is a man,’ he says. ‘He will be seen 300 times each day. This is a woman. Her privacy is all used up. The man and the woman meet.’ It’s a love story, to begin with. The woman works on a dairy farm. She watches the cows. And is watched by cameras. The people who monitor the cameras are also being watched, watching. The film shows a couple having sex in a car, it shows sweet nothings being whispered in a restaurant, a car chase on the motorway, wild punch-ups and plastic surgery. The film has been screened at festivals, including the Toronto International Film Festival. It may be the first feature film for which not a single scene has been acted or specially filmed. Every image, every scene – over 600 of them – comes from Chinese surveillance and live-stream cameras.

  China is eagerly bringing the future into the present, and at a much faster pace than the West dares to adopt. ‘In 2013, when I had the idea for the film, there was hardly any material,’ says the Beijing artist Xu Bing, who had become a global name in the late 1980s with his installation ‘A Book from the Sky’, for which he invented thousands of new Chinese characters. ‘But then, in around 2015, suddenly all these streams started appearing online, on websites that anyone could access. A lot of them were surveillance cameras belonging to individuals and private companies. Suddenly we had much, much more material that we ever could have hoped for. It exploded at a rate no one could imagine.’ Xu Bing’s team set up 20 computers to download images 24 hours a day. They took 11,000 hours of video and distilled it down to 81 minutes for Dragonfly Eyes.

  A few kilometres from Xu Bing’s studio is a functional room with screens on the walls – a lot of screens, with faces on them. They are our faces: from the street, from the corridor, each with a name, sex and ID number. They have been captured by the cameras of Megvii Face++,
one of the hottest start-ups in a hot sector, which claims it wants to change the world. Here, artificial intelligence is a business model. Megvii Face++ is already doing something the State Council plan has only just called for. In this room stands a young man named Xie Yinan. He’s a marketing director. Xie Yinan is wearing trainers, a T-shirt, cool glasses; he laughs often and speaks with the missionary zeal of someone who looks the future in the eye every day. ‘It’s like being in a movie,’ he says. ‘I’ve been here three years now, and when I started, I couldn’t have dreamed we’d be able to do the stuff we’re doing today. All the things you’ve seen in science fiction films – we’re going to make them a reality.’ He looks exhausted; it’s a long time since he had a day off. But he’s also euphoric. His country wants to become the world number one in the field of artificial intelligence. And his company wants to become the number one in its field. These are the times we’re living in. ‘We want to give the city eyes,’ says Xie Yinan. ‘And we want to make them intelligent.’

  Megvii and SenseTime, probably its biggest competitor, are based not far from each other in modern office blocks in the Haidian district of Beijing, cheek by jowl with the country’s elite universities. The glass door at the entrance to SenseTime opens when the cameras recognise the face of the person approaching. One captures my face and projects it onto a screen in the reception area. ‘Male,’ it says next to my picture. ‘Age: 45’. It’s seven years out. ‘But you look so much younger,’ says the lady on reception. ‘Attractiveness: 99 per cent,’ the screen caption adds. It occurs to me that the algorithm might just have a flattery mode for potential customers programmed into it. Then the screen shows my mood: ‘Annoyed’. Well, overtired might be more accurate. And then a video screen starts to play an advert that the system has selected for me: Wuliangye, a millet-based baijiu, 52 per cent proof. Just what grumpy 45-year-olds with money and power would drink in China.

  Thanks to the technology of SenseTime and Megvii, people were able to unlock their Huawei or Vivo smartphones using their faces long before Apple came up with the idea. They can also use their faces to order fries in KFC in Hangzhou. Or pay for their shopping using the Alipay app, as more than 700 million Chinese citizens already do on a regular basis. Hotels in China use Megvii cameras to check that guests really are who they say they are. Train stations in cities like Guangzhou or Wuhan only allow entry to people once their faces have been scanned and checked against the police database. The company is currently testing unmanned supermarkets. ‘Thanks to our cameras, we can tell how old customers are, whether they’re physically fit and what brands they wear,’ says Xie. ‘And judging from the things they buy, we can categorise them as a certain type of person, and then target them with specific ads and special offers.’

  Another group has been taken through the exhibition room ahead of us, one of whom is wearing police uniform. The guide points to a screen on which a great crowd of people is moving; it looks like the crowd is swaying back and forth, and the people on the screen are highlighted in various shades of red and green. It looks like an infrared picture. Among other things, the guide tells us, the system can predict the movements of crowds. ‘We’ve sold it into a lot of provinces, and it’s being used in Xinjiang, too … We’ve had some good feedback.’ Xinjiang is the troubled province in western China that is home to the Muslim Uighurs.

  The eyes of the city. The eyes of the Party. For the individual, his or her face becomes a key, opening the door to the world outside. For the observer, the camera becomes a key that unlocks the world inside the individual, and their behaviour. ‘Criminals today need to think hard about whether they’re going to keep committing crimes,’ says Xie Yinan. ‘Our algorithm can support networks of 50,000 to 100,000 surveillance cameras. We can tell you what kind of person you’ll find in a given place at a given time. We can ask: “Who is that? Where is he? How long is he there for? Where’s he going now?” We track a person from one camera to the next.’ The system, says Xie, is already much better at recognising faces than people are.

  Megvii and the other companies advertise their commercial applications, showcasing apps that magic a funny dog’s nose onto your face. But the identity of their most important investor and their biggest customer is no secret: it’s the state, and in particular the security services. Xie talks about receiving letters of gratitude from police stations all over the country. Some 3,000 criminals, whose faces were stored in the authorities’ databases, have fallen into the laps of the police over the course of the last year, he says, thanks to the cameras. The 2017 Qingdao International Beer Festival made headlines: 25 people who had spent a long time on wanted lists were arrested as a result to facial recognition. In April 2018, in a stadium in Nanchang, cameras picked out a 31-year-old whose profile had been placed on a national database for ‘economic offences’ – from a crowd of 60,000 concert-goers.

  The cameras can do more: they report when a face turns up at a particular place – a bus stop, for instance – with suspicious frequency. ‘That could be a pickpocket,’ says Xie. At SenseTime, a few blocks away, they also demonstrate how the cameras analyse crowds. The system can tell when a lot of people are gathering, says the company’s spokeswoman Yuan Wei. And when a lot of people are about to gather. The algorithm can also see when a lot of people are moving in one direction, while a single individual is going against the flow. ‘The system then identifies this person as abnormal,’ says Yuan Wei. And it sounds the alarm.

  In 2017, Megvii had 200 employees. A year later, that number had risen to 1,500. Many of them have returned home from the USA. China isn’t just trying to import AI technologies and to buy out firms in the USA and Europe; it is also actively head-hunting AI talent, in growing competition with Silicon Valley. The state plays a central role, having launched a ‘thousand talents’ programme, which provides attractive incentives and benefits to those willing to settle and work in China. In late 2017, the Ministry for Science and Technology launched a project for ‘transformative technologies’, among whose aims is to develop new high-performance chips by 2021, in order to power neuronal networks.

  Unlike earlier large-scale science projects – in biotechnology, for instance – Beijing knows that the field of artificial intelligence is too broad, too diverse and too dynamic to be driven forward effectively by brute force from the state, with planning bureaucrats issuing and pushing through top-down edicts. The contribution of private high-tech companies and countless start-ups, and their cooperation with the state, are central to Beijing’s plans. The government is keeping these companies close: the Ministry of Technology has officially selected firms like Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and the speech-recognition company iFlytek to lead the development of nationwide AI platforms in areas such as self-driving cars, smart cities, medical diagnostics and speech recognition. This gives the chosen firms an advantage in these markets, with valuable access to state databases. At the end of 2018 the Chinese Academy for Information Technology, a think-tank operated by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) produced a ‘white paper on AI security’ praising the large private internet companies Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu and Netease for their active contributions to the ‘intelligentization of national social governance,’ in fields such as ‘security monitoring, data investigation and public opinion control’.101

  The private sector, generously supported by state funds, has begun to open its own laboratories in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, allowing Chinese companies to woo foreign AI experts with the promise of great salaries and even greater opportunities. Come to China; you can do more there. And you can do it faster. The West getting tangled up in legal restrictions and data protection concerns, while China just goes ahead with things. In November 2017, Megvii gathered 460 million dollars in a single round of investment – at the time busting the world record for an AI start-up. Since then, the firm’s technology has won several competitions, beating teams from Google, Microsoft and Facebook. Since 2015, SenseTime’s research team ha
s presented more new studies at the world’s major AI conferences than Google or Facebook, and in April 2018 it overtook its competitor Megvii when it brought in 600 million dollars of new investment, becoming the highest-valued AI start-up in the world. In 2019, Sense-Time is hoping to raise a further two billion dollars. Similar start-ups are springing up like mushrooms all over China. Much of their seed funding comes from state investment sources. And the money arrives quickly: in China, it takes little more than nine months for a newly founded start-up to see the first payment from the investment funds; in the USA, the average is currently just over 15 months.

  ‘This is just the beginning,’ says Xie Yinan. ‘The market is growing rapidly. Competition doesn’t worry us, the demand is huge, there’s room for everyone.’ In 2016 there were 176 million surveillance cameras in China. At that point, the USA had 62 million – more per head of population than China. But here too, the ambitious nature of Chinese plans and the speed at which they’re implemented are making China the frontrunner: by 2020 those 176 million cameras will have become more than 600 million, many of them equipped with AI technology. Very soon, SenseTime is planning to invest in five super-computers, to run the ‘Viper’ system it has developed. Viper will apparently be able automatically to monitor and analyse the data from networks of up to 100,000 cameras.

 

‹ Prev