By the 2020s, the Chinese
government had made significant advances in applying computer technology to
garden-variety surveillance. To do so, that government relied to a significant
extent on Chinese companies, and this in turn encouraged innovation at those
companies even for non-governmental applications. I contend that treating this
as a case study in business and government, without bringing in the ethical and
political implications is a mistake. The ostensive “objectivity” of empirical
social science may seem like an objective for scholars, but I submit that
bringing in political and ethical theory renders the analysis superior to that
which political economy alone can provide.
David Yang, who teaches economics
at Harvard, spoke on a panel on China on October 11, 2024 on why some Chinese
companies were developing AI technology even though generally technological development
tends to go on in democracies rather than dictatorships. The reason for the
exception, he said, is that the Chinese government had been buying
facial-recognition software from companies in order to improve surveillance of
the Chinese. Ignoring the unsavory ethical implications of a more totalitarian
surveillance, Yang characterized the relationship between the businesses and
the government as a win-win. The purchases by the government gives the
companies the financial incentive and wherewithal to innovate AI for other,
purely commercial purposes, and the government can more easily “restore order
locally from social unrest.” Characterizing political protests as unrest can
be said to be taken from an autocrat’s handbook, which unfairly casts a
negative glow on what in a democracy is seen as healthy. Omitting the ethical
implications from relations between business and government generally is thus partial
both with respect to wholeness or completeness and in the sense of being
biased. Even though Yang tried to present the relationship between the Chinese
companies working on facial-recognition and the Chinese government buying the
finished products objectively, his omission of the ethical dimension resulted
in an incomplete explanation and a pro-autocratic bias. Even though such a bias
could be said to be in sync with Harvard’s police-state, the hegemony of social
order as the top value in political theory is problematic.
To be sure, social value could come
with a government’s use of facial-recognition AI technology. Dave Davies, an
American journalist who ventured inside China’s “surveillance state,” has argued
that the Chinese Communist Party was “trying to internalize control. . . . Once
you believe its true, it’s like you don’t even need the policeman at the corner
anymore, because you’re becoming your own policeman.”[1]
Once we shift from political protests to criminal activity, it is easier for even
a democrat to see the value in prompting people to police themselves so a visible
police-state apparatus in public would not be as likely. This is the antithesis
of the “invisible man” question: What would you do that is illegal were you
invisible so no one would see you and you wouldn’t get caught? Instead, we can ask: What wouldn’t you do
that you otherwise would do if you thought odds were high that you would get
caught by police using facial-recognition AI technology?
But even with this
internalization of control within an individual, which admittedly does not
reach the individual not wanting to steal or injure someone in some way,
the loss of privacy in public can be reckoned as an ethical (i.e., undeserved)
harm that outweighs the ethical benefit of internalized control. Ben Franklin,
one of the founding fathers of the United States, famously said that people who
would trade privacy for more security deserve neither liberty nor safety. Of course,
liberty is severely repressed in a dictatorship, and such a government can freely
reduce people’s privacy with impunity in getting carried away with adding
security measures. Ironically, such action by a pseudo-government can be
observed at major universities in the States, including at Yale and Harvard,
whose police departments do not have democratic legitimacy because the U.S.
Constitution gives the police power to the state and federal governments rather
than to even very wealthy private (“non-profit”) organizations.
Whether in the United States or China, a republic (of republics) or an autocracy (or dictatorship), the human instinctual urge for still more control can manifest so easily in a sliding slope towards an excessively visible (and invisible), and thus impinging, police-state. The mind’s judgment concerning whether it has gone too far in this regard is susceptible to distorting itself or even suspending itself due to the allure of the pleasure of increasing control in a geographical area (or organization). In short, control is not easily internalized in people in whose discretion security measures lie. It is ironic that the internalization of control is easier when applied to individuals being controlled. An external check on the minds of the controllers is thus strongly advisable, lest we do not all wake up one day in a world in which we are surrounded by manifestations of passive-aggression and even unaccountable police brutality by people drunk with power from having the legal right to use lethal weapons. Cameras in public places are certainly superior to an overwhelming visible police presence in public places (and universities whose atmospheres are at least in principle academic in nature), but even with the ethical and practical value of internalized control, the unethical costs in terms of invasion of privacy should not be minimized or ignored outright. Achieving a policy that is balanced may not be easy, but I suspect it is best.
1. Dave Davies, “Facial Recognition and Beyond: Journalist Ventures Inside China’s ‘Surveillance State’,” NPR.org, January 5, 2021.
