China is reportedly using artificial intelligence for control

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Meng Jianzhu, head of the Communist Party’s central commission for political and legal affairs said: “Artificial intelligence can complete tasks with a precision and speed unmatchable by humans. He told the Chinese website, The Paper, that “AI will drastically improve the predictability, accuracy and efficiency of social management.” The story The Minority Report by American writer Philip K Dick, imagines “precogs” who foresee all crime, allowing members of a special “pre-crime” squad to pick up suspects before the crime is committed.

Sixty-three years later, the line between science fiction and reality is blurring fast, especially in the troubled west China region of Xinjiang. China has turned the province into one of the world’s major centers for social control and crime prediction via artificial intelligence. Authorities are using an application called the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP) in the region to identify suspects and predict “abnormal” behaviour. The IJOP system surveils and collects data on everyone in Xinjiang. READ MORE: ‘Conventional war is dead’ Expert says West is ‘wasting money’

The artificial intelligence can predict crime with a ‘precision and speed unmatchable by humans’

It tracks the movement of people by monitoring the “trajectory” and location data of their phones, ID cards, and vehicles. When irregularities or deviations from what it considers normal are detected, such as when people are using a phone that is not registered to them, when they use more electricity than “normal,” or when they leave the area in which they are registered to live without police permission. A Human Rights Watch report found that the system flags these “micro-clues” to the authorities as suspicious and prompts an investigation. The IJOP app instructs officers to investigate people who are related to people who have obtained a new phone number or who have foreign links. One former Uyghur detainee released from one of Xinjiang’s “re-education camps” described how the system manifests in reality. He said: “I was entering a mall, and an orange alarm went off. “The police came and took him to a police station. “I said to them, ‘I was in a detention center and you guys released me because I was innocent. “The police told me, just don’t go to any public places.”