After years of breakneck growth, China’s security and surveillance industry is now focused on shoring up its vulnerabilities to the United States and other outside actors, worried about risks posed by hackers, advances in artificial intelligence and pressure from rival governments.
The renewed emphasis on self-reliance, combating fraud and hardening systems against hacking was on display at the recent Security China exhibition in Beijing.
Looming over the four-day meet: China’s biggest geopolitical rival, the United States. American-developed AI chatbot ChatGPT was a frequent topic of conversation, as were U.S. efforts to prevent China’s access to cutting-edge technology.
“This new technology contains a great potential danger,” said Fan Weicheng, Director of Tsinghua University’s Center for Public Safety Research. He clicked through a presentation featuring an AI-generated figure of Barack Obama speaking, illustrating the risks of deceptive images and video that can now be digitally created.
“The United States has a 21st century national security strategy. Russia has a national security strategy. Germany has a strategy. So does Japan,” Fan said. “We in China are also working on this.”
Chinese academics, Fan says, are working on an “early warning system” to identify and manage potentially disruptive technology, creating indexes and formulas to measure the impact emerging technology could have on China’s national security.
In the past decade, China’s AI technology has made rapid advances, fueled in part through cooperation with American research institutes and tech firms. As in the U.S., Chinese leaders are worried about advances in artificial intelligence.
But there’s an additional challenge. As geopolitical tensions have reached a fever pitch in recent years, Washington has moved to cut China’s access to American technology — pushing Chinese tech firms towards self-reliance.
Remarks from a meeting chaired by Chinese leader Xi Jinping last month urged a renewed focus on potential risks from new technologies.
“The complexity and severity of national security problems faced by our country have increased dramatically,” said a readout of the meeting by the official Xinhua news agency. “We must be prepared for worst-case and extreme scenarios.”
“It’s the AI era. The future has arrived,” said Liu Caixia, a director at a Chinese policing research institute. “Those in the academic community are feeling fear.”
“We’ve seen in some sci-fi blockbusters, there’s only intelligent machines left in the world, and human beings are kept like pets,” said Liu. “What kind of attitude should we adopt to deal with it?”
Liu’s answer was clear and in line with China’s determination to lead in cutting edge technologies: Push forward, and deploy AI in new fields. DAKE KANG, BEIJING, MDT/AP
