Artificial Intelligence, Surveillance, and Big Data

TL;DR

This paper explores how political regimes influence AI research and data availability, highlighting that authoritarian states like China can boost deep learning research through surveillance-driven datasets despite hindering overall innovation.

Contribution

It analyzes the contrasting effects of authoritarian and democratic regimes on AI progress and dataset access, emphasizing China's unique role in surveillance-based data collection.

Findings

Authoritarian regimes negatively impact overall AI innovation.

China's surveillance policies provide large datasets that enhance deep learning research.

Different political regimes influence AI development trajectories and data accessibility.

Abstract

The most important resource to improve technologies in the field of artificial intelligence is data. Two types of policies are crucial in this respect: privacy and data-sharing regulations, and the use of surveillance technologies for policing. Both types of policies vary substantially across countries and political regimes. In this chapter, we examine how authoritarian and democratic political institutions can influence the quality of research in artificial intelligence, and the availability of large-scale datasets to improve and train deep learning algorithms. We focus mainly on the Chinese case, and find that -- ceteris paribus -- authoritarian political institutions continue to have a negative effect on innovation. They can, however, have a positive effect on research in deep learning, via the availability of large-scale datasets that have been obtained through government surveillance. We propose a research agenda to study which of the two effects might dominate in a race for leadership in artificial intelligence between countries with different political institutions, such as the United States and China.