From: Foreign Policy | Argument
Tech competition is being used to push a dangerous corporate agenda.
BY GRAHAM WEBSTER, SCARLET KIM
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Some U.S. companies have used the specter of an AI race to head off user protections they see as burdensome. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for example, has portrayed a trade-off between a need for “special consent for sensitive features like facial recognition” and the risk that “we’re going to fall behind Chinese competitors and others around the world who have different regimes for different, new features like that.”
Investors have also advanced the idea. “AI is run on data as fuel, and China has so much more data than any other country,” venture capitalist and computer scientist Kai-Fu Lee has put it, adding that “Chinese users are willing to trade their personal privacy data for convenience or safety. It’s not an explicit process, but it’s a cultural element.” And at a recent Asian investment conference in Hong Kong, a Credit Suisse executive proclaimed, “What will make China be big in AI and big data is: China has no serious law protecting data privacy.”
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