This artificial intelligence may start tracking you soon

From Fox News.com (Oct. 27)":

It’s already 1984 in China.

For the last year, the people of Hangzhou, China – a city of more than nine million – have had every moment of their lives tracked.

“City Brain,” an artificial intelligence system that interlinks with a city’s infrastructure was installed in October 2016, through a partnership with Alibaba and Foxconn.

In an effort to optimize Hangzhou and make urban life easier, the system tracked everything from robberies to traffic jams and learned the city’s unique patterns and needs.

Residents were also tracked through their activity on social media. Their commutes, purchases, interactions and movements were all learned and absorbed by the AI database.

“In China, people have less concern with privacy, which allows us to move faster,” Xian-Sheng Hua, an AI manager at Alibaba, said during a presentation at the World Summit AI meeting in early October.

And, according to New Scientist, the system works. [read more]

So, Big Brother is already in China? Not too surprising. That’s what usually happens in a totalitarian society. I wonder if the system is used to track down or monitor dissent? If not now, probably in the future. Well, the article did say residents were tracked on social media. So, there you go.