🤖 The Trinternet Does Skynet
As the internet splinters, China and the US are increasingly facing off in a race to export political ideals via technology. (Early in the Covid pandemic is looked like national response was going to be another battleground for this, but time has proven China’s approach less than ideal.)
China can essentially export authoritarianism-in-a-box thanks to their surveillance setup. The US certainly has the tools, but the deployment is–at the very least–less overt.
China currently leads the globe in facial recognition exports. The US is a lagging second (201 v 128). This lead holds for all AI-related exports, but that feels misleading as AI is–at least currently–a server-based technology and the West houses the more robust AI models (at least based on headlines but I’m pretty sure the data holds).
Whether or not these exports are a trojan horse for spreading the China Model remains to seen, but it will be interesting because (and I wish I could find where I found this originally):
Crypto has a tendency to centralize while AI has a tendency to decentralize, which is counter to the logical assumptions about the technologies.
A decentralizing technology could undermine a centralizing regime.