About Energy The New High-tech Despotism

Artificial intelligence technology is advancing and bringing opportunities for society but also profound challenges for individual freedom. AI is a powerful enabler of surveillance technology, such as facial recognition, and many countries are grappling with appropriate rules for use, weighing the security benefits against privacy risks. Authoritarian regimes, however, lack strong institutional mechanisms to protect individual privacy--a free and independent press, civil society, an independent judiciary--and the result is the widespread use of AI for surveillance and repression. This dynamic is most acute in China, where the Chinese government is pioneering new uses of AI to monitor and control its population. China has already begun to export this technology along with laws and norms for illiberal uses to other nations. As AI-enabled surveillance technology spreads around the globe, how it is used poses profound challenges for the future of democracy, liberty, and individual freedom.