The Role of AI in a Security and Population Control System: Chinese Social Credit System

Introduction

Nowadays, issues such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), facial recognition and Big Data have become part of our everyday vocabulary and are something we only knew about in science fiction films and books, but once again we are witnessing that reality exceeds the limits of imagination. In this chapter we will look at the control, in terms of security, through the use of AI systems, of populations by states. It is a phenomenon coeval with the rise of the 4.0 revolution, which contributes to understanding the changing environment, motivated, among other factors, by technological development and the new ethical paradigms built around IA.

The paradigmatic case around which this chapter is structured is the Chinese social credit, projected in a short period of time to other countries. For this reason, the primary objectives of this paper revolve around two questions:

• 1.

  to analyse the motivations that have led China to develop and implement this model and the type of policies applied around social credit.

• 2.

  To explore the tools on which it is based and the debate surrounding the implementation of a population control procedure of these dimensions, as well as the discussion generated by its expansion to other countries.

Main Focus Of The Chapter

The questions we asked ourselves before writing these pages and which we will try to answer in the chapter on conclusions are several: is the reality we are facing thanks to the new technologies a positive application, is the application of these social control measures justifiable in a state like China, and can these same measures be applied in democratic environments without falling into the contradiction of respect for individual liberties? These questions are intimately linked to the debate between security and freedom, which in China is hardly open to discussion due to the prevailing political system, but which, when transferred to other countries with guarantee-based regimes, does raise a wide-ranging debate. In this sense, we support the line opened in the article “Towards a new era of mass data collection: Assessing pandemic surveillance technologies to preserve user privacy” in which the debate on the handling of data by large institutions and the right of users to preserve their privacy is raised (Ribeiro-Soriano, Saura Palacios-Marqués, 2021).

Our starting hypotheses, therefore, in an attempt to answer the questions posed, are as follows:

• 1.

  Western society is not prepared for an increase in state social control measures such as the Chinese social credit as a cultural, economic, and political matter.

• 2.

  China possesses the tools to impose social control because of its cultural tradition, which is prone to population control and order.

• 3.

  In some Western countries the implementation of alternative social control measures is denied, sometimes justified by the need to maintain minimum levels of security.