From We have been harmonised (Kai Strittmatter, 2020) pp183-8
Thanks to the technology of SenseTime and Megvii, people were able to unlock their Huawei or Vivo smartphones using their faces long before Apple came up with the idea. They can also use their faces to order fries in KFC in Hangzhou. Or pay for their shopping using the Alipay app, as more than 700 million Chinese citizens already do on a regular basis. Hotels in China use Megvii cameras to check that guests really are who they say they are. Train stations in cities like Guangzhou or Wuhan only allow entry to people once their faces have been scanned and checked against the police database. The company is currently testing unmanned supermarkets, “Thanks to our cameras, we can tell how old customers are, whether they’re physically fit and what brands they wear, says Xie. ‘And judging from the things they buy, we can categorise them as a certain type of person, and then target them with specific ads and special offers.
Another group has been taken through the exhibition room ahead of us, one of whom is wearing police uniform. The guide points to a screen on which a great crowd of people is moving; it looks like the crowd is swaying back and forth, and the people on the screen are highlighted in various shades of red and green. It looks like an infrared picture. Among other things, the guide tells us, the system can predict the movements of crowds. “We’ve sold it into a lot of provinces, and it’s being used in Xinjiang, too… We’ve had some good feedback’ Xinjiang is the troubled province in western China that is home to the Muslim Uighurs.
The eyes of the city. The eyes of the Party. For the individual, his or her face becomes a key, opening the door to the world outside. For the observer, the camera becomes a key that unlocks the world inside the individual, and their behaviour. “Criminals today need to think hard about whether they’re going to keep committing crimes; says Xie Yinan. “Our algorithm can support networks of 50,000 to 100,000 surveillance cameras. We can tell you what kind of person you’ll find in a given place at a given time. We can ask: “Who is that? Where is he? How long is he there for? Where’s he going now?” We track a person from one camera to the next: The system, says Xie, is already much better at recognising faces than people are.
Megvii and the other companies advertise their commercial applications, showcasing apps that magic a funny dog’s nose onto your face. But the identity of their most important investor and their biggest customer is no secret: it’s the state, and in particular the security services. Xie talks about receiving letters of gratitude from police stations all over the country. Some 3,000 criminals, whose faces were stored in the authorities’ databases, have fallen into the laps of the police over the course of the last year, he says, thanks to the cameras. The 2017 Qingdao International Beer Festival made headlines: 25 people who had spent a long time on wanted lists were arrested as a result to facial recognition. In April 2018, in a stadium in Nanchang, cameras picked out a 31-year-old whose profile had been placed on a national database for ‘economic offences’ from a crowd of 60,000 concert-goers.
The cameras can do more: they report when a face turns up at a particular place a bus stop, for instance with suspicious frequency. ‘That could be a pickpocket? says Xie. At SenseTime, a few blocks away, they also demonstrate how the cameras analyse crowds. The system can tell when a lot of people are gathering, says the company’s spokeswoman Yuan Wei. And when a lot of people are about to gather. The algorithm can also see when a lot of people are moving in one direction, while a single individual is going against the flow. “The system then identifies this person as abnormal; says Yuan Wei. And it sounds the alarm.
In 2017, Megvii had 200 employees. A year later, that number had risen to 1,500. Many of them have returned home from the USA. China isnt just trying to import AI technologies and to buy out firms in the USA and Europe; it is also actively head-hunting AI talent, in growing competition with Silicon Valley. The state plays a central role, having launched a ‘thousand talents’ programme, which provides attractive incentives and benefits to those willing to settle and work in China. In late 2017, the Ministry for Science and Technology launched a project for ‘transformative technologies, among whose aims is to develop new high performance chips by 2021, in order to power neuronal networks.
Unlike earlier large-scale science projects in biotechnology, for instance Beijing knows that the field of artificial intelligence is too broad, too diverse and too dynamic to be driven forward effectively by brute force from the state, with planning bureaucrats issuing and pushing through top-down edicts. The contribution of private high-tech companies and countless start-ups, and their cooperation with the state, are central to Beijing’s plans. The government is keeping these companies close: the Ministry of Technology has officially selected firms like Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and the speech-recognition company iFlytek to lead the development of nationwide AI platforms in areas such as self-driving cars, smart cities, medical diagnostics and speech recognition. This gives the chosen firms an advantage in these markets, with valuable access to state databases. At the end of 2018 the Chinese Academy for Information Technology, a thinktank operated by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) produced a ‘white paper on AI security’ praising the large private internet companies Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu and Netease for their active contributions to the ‘intelligentization of national social governance, in fields such as ‘security monitoring, data investigation and public opinion control.”
The private sector, generously supported by state funds, has begun to open its own laboratories in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, allowing Chinese companies to woo foreign Al experts with the promise of great salaries and even greater opportunities. Come to China; you can do more there. And you can do it faster. The West is getting tangled up in legal restrictions and data protection concerns, while China just goes ahead with things. In November 2017, Megvii gathered 460 million dollars in a single round of investment at the time busting the world record for an AI start-up. Since then, the firm’s technology has won several competitions, beating teams from Google, Microsoft and Facebook. Since 2015, SenseTime’s research team has presented more new studies at the world’s major AI conferences than Google or Facebook, and in April 2018 it overtook its competitor Megvii when it brought in 600 million dollars of new investment, becoming the highest-valued AI start-up in the world. In 2019, SenseTime is hoping to raise a further two billion dollars. Similar start-ups are springing up like mushrooms all over China. Much of their seed funding comes from state investment sources. And the money arrives quickly: in China, it takes little more than nine months for a newly founded start-up to see the first payment from the investment funds; in the USA, the average is currently just over 15 months.
‘This is just the beginning; says Xie Yinan. “The market is growing rapidly. Competition doesn’t worry us, the demand is huge, there’s room for everyone’ In 2016 there were 176 million surveillance cameras in China. At that point, the USA had 62 million more per head of population than China. But here too, the ambitious nature of Chinese plans and the speed at which they’re implemented are making China the frontrunner: by 2020, those 176 million cameras will have become more than 600 million, many of them equipped with AI technology. Very soon, SenseTime is planning to invest in five supercomputers, to run the ‘Viper’ system it has developed. Viper will apparently be able automatically to monitor and analyse the data from networks of up to 100,000 cameras.
The Communist Party has discovered a new magic weapon in big data and artificial intelligence that much was evident from Party and state leader Xi Jinping’s New Year’s address to the Chinese people in 2018. As he does every year, Xi sat in front of a large wall of books; the observant viewer could make out Homer’s Odyssey and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea on the shelves. And as they do every year, internet users subsequently took a magnifying glass to each book spine.
Many noticed that this year, Xi Jinping had brought The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital down within reach, Most significantly, though, for the first time two bestsellers on artificial intelligence had been given a prominent position on the shelves: Brett King’s Augmented was sitting next to The Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingos, Domingos researches AI at the University of Washington, and his book invites people to join him in the search for the algorithm to end all algorithms, an algorithm that will go on developing itself infinitely. ‘If it exists; Domingos writes, ‘the Master Algorithm can derive all knowledge in the world past, present and future from data. Inventing it would be one of the greatest advances in the history of science.’ Of course, there is no guarantee that Xi has really read King and Domingos unlike Marx.
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