Beijing’s big tech push to rule the world of AI
Chinese high-tech companies lead the charge with a growing share of crucial global markets
China is among the most active players in the global push to govern artificial intelligence. Recent years have seen an increase in Chinese nationals setting the technical standards governing AI in multilateral organizations.
Beijing is also shaping AI-related initiatives in the United Nations and issuing high-level declarations about the global principles that it believes should govern this technology.
But rather than these formal measures, the most consequential element of China’s impact might end up being the growing global market share of Chinese technology companies.
This commercial penetration of AI will likely limit the scope of any international agreements governing this technology.
China’s dynamic innovation ecosystem, national support of AI development, and long-term goal of expanding the commercial reach of its firms have seen Chinese technology companies become active players in global markets.
Artificial intelligence
In Saudi Arabia, Chinese technology companies SenseTime and Dahua are partnering with local enterprises on AI-enabled surveillance projects. SenseTime has also built Saudi Arabia’s first supercomputing center and established the Saudi AI Education Program.
It now delivers an artificial intelligence curriculum to Saudi teachers and students. In Uganda, Huawei and CloudWalk have rolled out AI-powered smart city infrastructure and mass facial recognition systems.
As well as using its cloud data centers in South Africa to extend artificial intelligence there, Huawei has set up a Cloud and AI Innovation Centre at its national headquarters in Johannesburg.
Similar examples abound in a wide range of markets in South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Africa. Chinese tech companies are growing their market share because they are typically competitively priced and can increase productivity and save money.
Some of the applications of Chinese AI technologies include increasing the efficiency of traffic and public transport systems and simplifying bureaucratic processes.
Although Chinese-made technology has the potential to spur economic growth, it also has a darker side. Many leading AT firms have been implicated in the profiling and oppression of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in China.
There are concerns that they are assisting governments to use AI-enabled technologies to monitor citizens and clamp down on dissent, including in Zimbabwe, Uganda, Ecuador, and other countries.
Given the controversy generated by the use of artificial intelligence to implement authoritarian policies, it is possible that some governments are not disclosing the full scope of their use of Chinese AI products.
It is also not clear if this is a deliberate play by Beijing to have other countries sign up to standards that permit authoritarian applications of AI.
Chinese companies have commercial reasons to grow their global market share and increase the adoption of their branded technologies.
AI standards
But regardless of whether it is by Beijing’s design, China stands to benefit from the international spread of its artificial intelligence firms.
As well as increasing international influence, it will also set its preferred AI standards and potentially its approach to governance more generally.
But this does not mean that formal multilateral processes and institutions aimed at shaping the use of artificial intelligence will be rendered impotent.
Equally, China’s AI push does not rule out the possibility of jurisdictions like the European Union or the United States shaping formal standards internationally through the gravitational pull of their market size.
Yet the impact of such measures – especially those that seek to embed liberal democratic norms and rules – is likely to be blunted by the commercial spread of China’s AI standards.
It will likely be impossible, for example, to reach a worldwide agreement on prohibiting the use of artificial intelligence for ethnic profiling. This is one of the growing range of markets in which Chinese technology companies operate.
The appetite in different jurisdictions for AI to implement authoritarian policies means that the lack of global agreement is neither surprising nor necessarily driven by Beijing.
At least some of the countries likely to block a global prohibition on using AI for ethnic profiling would presumably take similar positions irrespective of whether they were using Chinese technology.
Despite disagreements over the legitimacy of using artificial intelligence to ethnically profile populations, there is broad global consensus on a suite of pressing problems.
Market share
Bar a few rogue actors, no one wants AI to democratize the development of new biological weapons or replace human command and control over nuclear-armed missiles.
Still, the expanding international market share of Chinese technology companies might make global agreement on a range of AI governance issues extremely difficult.
Benjamin Herscovitch is a research fellow in the School of Regulation and Global Governance at The Australian National University.
This work was supported by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) under Agreement No. 78366. The views expressed therein are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Australian government or DFAT.
This article is republished from East Asia Forum under a Creative Commons license. Read the original here.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of China Factor.