Artificial Intelligence Isn't an Agent of Oppression but in China it's Already the Tool

Since their entrance into mainstream political consciousness, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data have long been a harbinger of political doom and a coming onslaught of global, geopolitical shifts. Movies, TV series, think pieces and tech reports paint and increasingly grim picture of power being handed over by governments and citizens to amorphous algorithms that govern with no transparency. The most dramatic depiction is the all-out data-driven apocalypse of the Terminator universe, but subtler, more intimate insights into our Data Hell come from Black Mirror, whose episodes shed light on people, relationships and societies that have sacrificed their subjectivity in the name of optimization. In the political sphere, a mainstream position in the Democratic party of the U.S. is that Russia stole the 2016 Presidential Election with advanced hacking tools and trolls. The emerging race between the U.S. and China to develop the most advanced AI is being called the Cold War of the 21st century; the central power struggle that defines an era for the world.