Does Chinese billionaire Jack Ma use AI to create dystopian cities? | Alfie Bown | Opinion

OIn the outskirts of Hangzhou, in eastern China, in Alibaba, Cloud Town, the nerve center of work and leisure in Silicon Valley, cutting-edge research in artificial intelligence and smart city developments in one of the China's largest technology companies are presented. It's a semi-empty dystopia with almost comical proportions where the future of automation and infrastructure in the south of China is playing out. While Alibaba 's exhibitions and conferences are sporadic, everything that goes on there remains hidden.

After long claiming to be apolitical, Jack Ma, co-founder and executive chairman of technology giant Alibaba, recently revealed himself to be a member of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This is another element in the long list of links between the corporate apparatus and the state apparatus that go far beyond China's borders. Nevertheless, an overview of the projects that the company is working on in Cloud Town, considered in light of these revelations, should sound the alarm ringing for fear of a dystopian future of state control and control. companies.

The technologies being developed at Cloud Town include AI cross lights that use face recognition to identify the age of a road vehicle and give them a longer green light if they are old / slow, to cars with AI drones that can meet the needs of pbadengers. .

The biggest feature of the car, explained the proud representative, is that its multimedia panel, linked to the smartphone of the user, reads the displacement schemes, the food choices and possibly even the photos and comments, and then It cuts through millions of datasets to make predictions. what the user might like to eat and how he would like to travel there or be transported by food. In short, the new citizen outsources to Alibaba part of his decision-making process, or even part of his desire. Our very impulses are mapped and planned in advance. The triangulation between data, predictive technology and desire could be the most important relationship that leads us into the dystopian future of the smart city.

It is not so far from the technology of Google Now that has made the headlines since its implementation in 2012. Here, an aspect until then neglected becomes visible: Alibaba could use its complex algorithms to focus on food establishments that use Alipay rather than those using WeChat Pay. or do not have an electronic payment system, for example. Similarly, if Google answers your questions before you post them, it will also lead you to paths you may never have borrowed. This is the first phase of implementation of a predictive technological revolution in which the desire is not only predicted, but gradually modified to adapt to particular agendas, in this case those of companies.

But the possibility made clear by the revelation that Ma is now (and perhaps has been for a while) an official CCP member is that this process of revising the movements and desires of a population could not only serve corporate interests, but closely badociated state.

Alibaba's rival, Tencent, is another big tech company closely linked to the Beijing government. Its heat map tells users where to gather the crowd. Such a tool could be used by authorities to prevent street protests. What Alibaba seems to focus on, however, is to develop more subtle ways to organize the movements and even the desires of the citizens of the future city. Will this also be at the service of the corporate state?

The danger here is for the West to focus on what we show about China's extremely dystopian tendencies, which we pose in opposition to our own seemingly democratic landscape. The trend is to report on the authoritarian future of high technology in China, as if it were not ours. In fact, however, what seems most strange in this revelation is the way it resonates with the patterns we have seen, at least in the United States. As Srećko Horvat pointed out, it is significant that former Google president Eric Schmidt has been appointed to head a Pentagon committee to integrate Silicon Valley with intelligence services. .

In the end, it is less about communism than about a new form of technology-based enterprise capitalism. Without more visibility and awareness of what is built, we can not see how these technologies are reorganizing their citizens.

• Alfie Bown is the author of The Dreamworld Playstation, a philosophy of play and politics