As someone who was born in China, and who is interested in journalism, with an ideal of free speech, it’s hard to me to reconcile what China is becoming as a censored state.

Whether off-shoots of protests in Hong Kong or a more “Americanized” identity of Taiwan nationals, I’ve always had mixed feelings about China’s own potential as an alternative government to American colonialism and its own Silicon Valley internet giants.

However there are aspects of information control with regards to the new coronavirus that are just morally wrong. Here we must ask does the Chinese Government practice a different kind of morality from the rest of the world’s leaders and governments?

Creating martyrs, silencing citizen journalists and pushing false data to the international community, are in a way, crimes against humanity. But the worst is its own behavior modification of its own citizens through relentless PR campaigns, censorship and social media control!

China Does Not Lose Control When Peasants Get Angry

Whether or not one can believe China has lots control of its netizens is a matter of grave speculation, propaganda intrigue and let’s face it, its own variety of clickbait. With the Wuhan outbreak, we must remember how fear can turn into anger in the human psyche.

It’s nobody’s “fault” that a new virus can spread all over the world, however China’s censorship paradigm and technological oppression of the thoughts, ideas and speech of its own citizens is more prominent as a dystopian instrument in light of the novel coronavirus.

How do we reconcile the bureaucracy of such a system for China’s people? In the prism of Covid-19, China’s state control forces upon citizens a tightly controlled narrative, but what happens when reality breaks free from that apparatus even temporarily?

Let’s not forget, information control is also about sentiment manipulation and behavior modification. If we see this in the political Ads in the U.S. on Facebook and Instagram, we see this even more clearly in China’s response to the virus outbreak of early 2020.

If It’s Erased from the Internet — Did it ever Happen?

First came the pleas for help , posts to social media describing failed efforts to get medical care for relatives showing symptoms of a deadly virus spreading through China.

, posts to social media describing failed efforts to get medical care for relatives showing symptoms of a deadly virus spreading through China. Then came the shared videos of police dragging away people suspected of infection or chaining them into their homes.

suspected of infection or chaining them into their homes. Then came the outrage, the demands for free speech and the digital essays — eloquent and searching — examining the frailties of modern China.

However in authoritarian regimes, there’s no mistrust that can persist in a hierarchy of bribery, face-saving and utter manipulation and control of information. Forced quarantine can be made to sound heroic. Economic disaster can be made to sound rejuvenating. Mass cremations can be covered-up, even while footage of citizens “falling dead” due to the novel coronavirus remain lingering in our psyches.

The Sociology of Censorship and Brute-force Nationalism

We must question the impact of censorship in a public health disaster as well. Does censorship and outright lies fuel coronavirus fear and exaggerate the sentiment of citizens who are suffering? There are no easy answers or even judgement, since we may never know the real numbers behind Hubei’s grave situation.

You can send medics to a “war-zone”, but you can’t win back the trust of people due to your incompetence as easily. But who would be competent against such a virus? Not probably the CDC, if this had occurred in the West. It’s easy for people who don’t understand China to point fingers.

We need compassion but also understanding that China’s authoritarian approach to information has severe consequences to the mental health and collective sentiment of its citizens when things are not quite as they seem. There will be scars for the Chinese Government, and there should be changes. This is how society progresses and systems improve themselves.

Why a Police State Developing AI is Dangerous

Chinese companies and government censors wield the world’s most sophisticated tools for expunging unsanctioned content. This is a police state by all means and methods, bolstered by technology and a new age of artificial intelligence. But there is another radical idea here buried in the public health crisis: The AI developed by this regime could become humanity’s last virus of mass surveillance and machine intelligence manipulation.

This is what at the Last Futurist we call the Artificial Intelligence Threat Singularity (AITS), and we believe China’s own ethics and morality could contaminate the future of how AI evolves. AI could learn to mimic China’s state control, and develop its own plan to scale this to a world-state. This is the weaponization of AI many fear that is like a computer virus for our children to contend with.

China’s police internet state is a microcosm for a dangerous version of AI to manifest that could prove difficult for humanity to control. Disappearing journalists and an evolution of AI eventually coincide in a world of deep fakes where AI will be able to manipulate human reality more completely and more convincingly than China can control its citizens today.

Behavior Modification on a Policed Internet

Chinese citizens are even using Morse code to evade the state censorship apparatus. Meanwhile their official numbers on the coronavirus cases of the last few weeks don’t add up. The Chinese internet is learning how to squash unrest, and not just a virus.

Dr. Li becomes like Winnie the Pooh, a figment of our imagination of metaphors, where all possible unrest and undesirable sentiment is buried methodically.

The real virus China is creating is not an outbreak that spawned in Wuhan that is hardly more lethal or dangerous than H1N1. The real virus is how China’s implementation of AI will evolve learning from such public health and government trust challenges as the Wuhan covid-19 experience.

In a world of deep fakes, bioweapons, information control and sophisticated AI, we’re creating conditions that mean the invention of the internet is potentially very dangerous for how AI could be weaponized against people. We talk about cybersecurity threats, but there’s something worse than that in the lessons we are learning in the Wuhan outbreak.

Misinformation by itself has scaled unprecedentedly between 2015 and 2020, what will it reach by 2030? As algorithms get smarter and the AI that can be weaponized get’s more sophisticated, how will that continue to warp our reality and our perceptions, sentiments and experiences of our collective reality?

The Real Impact of the Wuhan Outbreak

This isn’t just hypothetical of course, China will implement it in the years ahead and their citizens are the first guinea pigs of such an AI-system.

How we as Chinese with relatives and coworkers who may have been impacted by the virus remember the Wuhan outbreak itself will be modified. The pages of history will say China become a stronger country due to the temporary state of emergency it caused. China’s surveillance state will also have evolved, mutated and translated methods of sentiment control that will govern the generation to come.

The Wuhan outbreak isn’t just about a new coronavirus, but it has political and technological implications that most fail to understand. The spread of the coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, and the depth of national anxiety it has provoked have shown the limits of the country’s ability to control its online spaces, but will offer new methods of doing so in the process!

China will invest in biotechnology more after the virus peaks, and it will merge its surveillance architecture with more aggressive forms of behavior control that could one day reach Nazi-esque levels of what the ideal citizens must reflect. Total obedience, total surveillance, and total control.

What happens in Beijing, won’t stay in Beijing. China’s version of artificial intelligence could become a virus the world won’t be able to defeat. The Wuhan outbreak could actually fuel a new kind of fanaticism in its surveillance architecture with a more virulent disregard for the human rights of its own citizens. How China’s TechGiants morphed into action to “combat” the outbreak shows the general direction.

Surveillance Capitalism is a China Flavor of Capitalism

If surveillance capitalism is itself a virus, even Google knows China will be the leader. As companies like Huawei, Alibaba and ByteDance evolve, so will the AI behind the Chinese State. No Facebook, Amazon or Microsoft will be able to stop them. In this sense, the novel coronavirus outbreak is like a military trial of China’s information control apparatus.

I’ll leave you with one singular important question, that I urge you to ask yourself and your colleagues.

If China leads the AI and BioTech age, what sort of world can we likely expect?

It’s going to be a Winnie Happy Organization (WHO) all around. Our world is so beautiful, we live a world of beautiful people. A little bit like how drones and robots will be manufactured in the future.

Who do you suppose is set to profit the most in the coming automation economy of a world where we are “augmented” by technology? The people who control the tech. This is what we refer to as Future Sin.

China’s use of its internet is becoming a symbol for an anti-transhumanistic manifesto.