In China, a vast technological mass surveillance network has been under construction for many years that the world has never seen before. And it's already on.
China's “social credit system,” which is expected to be fully operational by 2020, does more than just control the country's nearly 1.4 billion citizens. It is also designed to control and enforce a gigantic social engineering experiment that some call gamification of trust - the use of typical game elements (scoring, karma, etc.) in marketing techniques to encourage interaction with a product. or service).
The essence of the large-scale project, which has been developing imperceptibly over the course of ten years, is to assign each citizen an “individual trust account”. According to the Chinese Communist Party, the system being implemented "will allow all trustworthy people to move freely within the Middle Kingdom, while preventing the discredited from taking another wrong step."
To achieve all this, an unprecedented scale system will cover the entire territory of China with tentacles of technological infrastructure, while the eyes and ears of the system will be about 200 million CCTV cameras already operating throughout the country.
The idea is that these constantly monitoring eyes are connected to a facial recognition system, the data of which, in turn, is interpreted by the Artificial Intelligence, which has access to all databases - financial and legal documents, medical records and network preference counters. In other words, to absolutely all data collected by these or those organizations from a particular user, visitor or client.
This is all very much like George Orwell's 1984 novel or the chilling episode Nosedive from the British television series Black Mirror, but China's ultimate plans seem to go much further.
“This is potentially a completely new way of managing society. Its ultimate goal is algorithmic control,”economist Martin Horzempa of the Peterson Institute for International Economics told The New York Times.
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The general scheme of the new control principle is logical and very simple.
In localized pilot programs that are already operating in all Chinese cities, citizens are assigned a virtual numerical score. Further, for all actions that the AI regards as "positive" (timely payment of bills, transfer of Chinese old women across the roadway, and so on), the citizen is replenished with a virtual account, which has a direct impact on the real account: when a certain amount of karma is collected, the citizen is entitled to discounts for more convenient lines of credit, and skip-the-line access to a service that usually requires a long wait.
However, if a citizen somehow violates the rules prescribed by the state (is late with utility bills and other payments, smokes in the wrong place, throws unkind looks on the street portraits of Comrade Xi, and so on), the AI begins to punish him, forcing him to pay for everything at maximum rates. by sending receipts for fines and even restricting freedom of movement (for example, not allowing you to enter the subway or buy train tickets).
The beautiful system of electronic paradise already has its first victims. For example, the journalist Liu Hu, who, even in his thoughts, did not offend the Artificial Intelligence, but had the imprudence to write a couple of times about corruption in the Chinese government. As a result, the AI blacklisted him, blocking access to the network, where Mr. Liu Hu had about 2 million subscribers, and the AI also banned him from traveling by rail, making not only work, but also emigration from China's bright future physically impossible. …
In an interview with Foreign Correspondent, Mr. Liu Hu says that most Chinese people are happy with the new system right now. Their eyes are blinded, and their ears are blocked, they know little about the world and are in illusion."
“It looks like this program will help improve the quality of life in the long term. As long as it doesn't violate my privacy, I'm fine,”says Joyce Hu, a saleswoman in Shanghai.
Moreover: among not saleswomen, but well-to-do citizens, the new system is even more popular and they are already using the karma of local pilot projects to their full extent.
In other words, The Show Must Go On, the game continues.