51. De-risking authoritarian AI: A balanced approach to protecting our digital ecosystems
- Author:
- Simeon Gilding
- Publication Date:
- 07-2023
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)
- Abstract:
- Artificial intelligence (AI)–enabled systems make many invisible decisions affecting our health, safety and wealth. They shape what we see, think, feel and choose, they calculate our access to financial benefits as well as our transgressions, and now they can generate complex text, images and code just as a human can, but much faster. So it’s unsurprising that moves are afoot across democracies to regulate AI’s impact on our individual rights and economic security, notably in the European Union (EU). But, if we’re wary about AI, we should be even more circumspect about AI-enabled products and services from authoritarian countries that share neither our values nor our interests. And, for the foreseeable future, that means the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—a revisionist authoritarian power demonstrably hostile to democracy and the rules-based international order, which routinely uses AI to strengthen its own political and social stability at the expense of individual human rights. In contrast to other authoritarian countries such as Russia, Iran and North Korea, China is a technology superpower with global capacity and ambitions and is a major exporter of effective, cost-competitive AI-enabled technology into democracies.
- Topic:
- Security, Science and Technology, Authoritarianism, Cybersecurity, and Artificial Intelligence
- Political Geography:
- China and Asia-Pacific