It won’t be “perfected.” It can’t be perfected (The New York Times, June 1, 2026).
The Chinese company Geedge Networks sells a commercial version of the Great Firewall, the surveillance and censorship software that China uses to control online activity. Those tools allow governments to monitor internet traffic and flag when someone tries to get around traditional internet censorship.
But according to leaked company documents, the firm is working on new products that use artificial intelligence to examine location data and internet use to predict who could do or say something critical of the government, according to researchers at Vanderbilt University.
Such technology, if perfected, would give authoritarian governments a powerful tool to use against perceived enemies….
The idea that an authoritarian government would use artificial intelligence to suppress dissent is troubling enough. But the use of A.I. to predict dissent well before a person has taken action has become a nightmare scenario, according to some involved in the industry.
“This is what happens when mass surveillance meets A.I.,” said Brett J. Goldstein, the director of the Wicked Problems Lab at Vanderbilt’s Institute of National Security. “Without checks and balances, what China is doing to its own citizens is a preview of what becomes possible anywhere these tools go unchecked.”
The projected technology can’t be perfected because human beings are not automatons. The way to get around the fact of free will in a fiction premised on the effectiveness of “precognition” like the movie “Minority Report” is to enlist mysticism. Simply posit special “extrasensory” powers of the sort that do not exist in real life except in the form of the standard tricks of the stage magician.
We can guess what will happen if and when Geedge Networks finalizes its whatsis software and if and when the CCP comes to rely on it. Some of the people flagged by the technology, whatever it is, will be innocent of any inclination to publicly criticize the Chinese Communist Party or any other agent of tyranny; and, for all anybody knows, might never lift a finger against the CCP if they were simply left alone. Others flagged will indeed be nurturing an inclination to resist tyranny and might one day do so if left alone. Another method the tyrants can try is dart-throwing.
Why would the Chinese Communist Party need the planned tech anyway? The equivalent of Geedge-like precog indictment and punishment is already being meted out against Tibetans, Uyghurs, practitioners of Falun Gong, and members of other targeted groups. The CCP does worry about avoiding false positives, which must be numberless. It couldn’t care less. It would regard an “effective” precog warning system as perhaps a useful propaganda tool but otherwise superfluous, as it would be.
Western hardware and software
The Times also mentions that the progress of Geedge Networks “appears to have been hampered by Biden-era export controls on U.S.-designed computer chips that power artificial intelligence. That suggests that U.S. restrictions may have slowed China’s development of the next generation of surveillance technology. Documents from Geedge show that in 2024, when tough U.S. export controls on China were in place, the company and its lab struggled to find enough computing power for surveillance technology.”
This result might have been predicted by the ordinary means of grasping relationships between causes and effects.
