Balaji Srinivasan: belief

Transcript context

…But say I’m in Shenzhen right now, as I understand it, there are several intersections where if I jaywalk, they will do facial surveillance on me, very likely identify me, find me automatically. There’s a very strong element of control there. In China, if you have a bad social credit score, maybe you can’t ride on the train or take a bus. Why isn’t the future simply easier control of people in this way, which would produce some more local public good but nonetheless be a kind of horrible dystopia that most of us wouldn’t want to live in? I think China may well be vectoring in that direction. The thing about it is, what they’re almost moving AI towards is almost like the all-seeing, all-knowing god of myth. Some of the stuff they’re doing with face recognition is taking all the surveillance footage they have and then turning it into something which can take somebody’s face, pull it out of that, pull it into a database, and then track a human being across the entirety of their life essentially. That takes it from, “Hey, I need to look at the surveillance camera and recognize this person” into something where the computer is recognizing them for me. It just completely levels up the threat level of what a surveillance camera is. What do I think that results in? It may result in a very low-crime society. It may be something that certainly does have lots of obvious negative aspects, and I probably wouldn’t want to live in a country like that. But it might be something that a lot of people nevertheless choose to live there. There’s folks who choose to live in places that you or I or folks in the West would not choose to live in. Maybe they think, “Hey, the tradeoffs are worth it.” I wouldn’t. Probably most westerners wouldn’t, but I’m not necessarily saying that that’s going to cause their civilization to fail. A lot of people thought, for example, that the Great Firewall in the early 2000s — because of the restriction of freedom of speech — would cause the Chinese internet to collapse, and it’d be a disaster, and they wouldn’t be able to get innovation and so on. They managed to get very far with the controlled internet. I have a little bit of a, for lack of a better term, modesty on this, where as bad as I think that future is, (a) I’m not sure it’s within our power to prevent it, and (b) I’m not sure the Chinese people would want the West to prevent it, or at least not all of them. That’s where I am on that. If I call up, say, Apple customer service and I need to prove I’m Tyler Cowen, one thing they might do is ask me for the last four digits of my Social Security number. This seems absurd. For one thing, that kind of information can be quite readily available. The future of personal identity — proving you are who you claim to be — say, 10, 15 years from now, what will that look like? How will we do it? Is it a retina scan? Is it fingerprint? Is it facial recognition? How will you prove to the world you’re you?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.