Camera Above the Classroom
sixthtone.com
sixthtone.com
- The central government's AI strategy is never directly criticized. Instead you get quotes like
She agrees that the intention of “intelligent education” is positive. As the NGAIDP guidelines suggest, the purpose of the initiative is to assist teachers in developing customized teaching methods and study plans for every student.
- On ubiquitous surveillance cameras, the example given is finding criminals in a crowd, not rounding up dissidents.
- The parts that are criticized are more about the implementation than the intention behind it. The potential for misuse isn't even mentioned, the focus is on potential lack of accuracy instead.
- Responsibility is shifted to the schools and companies, despite following the government's plan:
The plan’s “intelligent education” section describes in detail how China’s government hopes to use AI to boost the country’s education system. Zhang reads me one paragraph from the guidelines without stammering. “So detailed. It’s like they wrote it with a [facial recognition] product right in front of them,” he says.
What I think this all means is that Sixth Tone is trying to be a source for high-quality journalism on social issues in China while conveniently avoiding topics the government would like to remain unmentioned.
No they’re not. They’re journalists living and working in China who publish pieces they don’t anticipate will get them shut down. They’re not going to cover the concentration camps in Xinjiang but it’s not an actual propaganda outlet like Xinhua.
> What I think this all means is that Sixth Tone is trying to be a source for high-quality journalism on social issues in China while conveniently avoiding topics the government would like to remain unmentioned.
It’s like they expect their readers to be intelligent people who can read between the lines.
To put it bluntly: this is what state censorship does to news. Even if they wanted to do better, they can't, because they'll get shut down or punished.
That doesn't mean I advise against reading them (I did say that they publish high-quality articles, after all) but you need to be aware that they're not going to tell the whole truth.
And I quote: "For instance, in November 2018, Chinese authorities wrongly accused entrepreneur Dong Mingzhu of jaywalking after a streetside camera identified her face in an ad on the side of a bus." - this is clearly not the work of a propagandist.
What are these for, I asked my host, wondering if it had to do with making sure courses were in line with party policy and so on.
"Mainly, it is to make sure you start and end courses on time. You need to start exactly at the strike of the bell and stay until the next bell rings."
What happens when you just turn out to be done with the material for the day, I asked, or you see the material was heavy and students have lost focus. In those cases I often end a bit earlier with my students.
"We can't leave. In most cases we just gossip a bit with the students until class is done."
Students didn't seem to bother, back then, most Chinese don't make a taboo of sleeping so some were close to drifting off. They're overworked and quiet, so I didn't mind that much either.
Is there a whole team checking all courses simultaneously, I inquired.
"No, sometimes no one will be watching. They're 'government officers' [officer is a common English translation used for anything government and administrative]... I don't think they care too much either. Their job is to make sure we do our job, you know."
With the advances in AI, the dream becomes a possibility. Watching a whole society. Even if you're not sure for what or it 'doesn't matter' what you're actually doing, the fact that something is always watching seems to be powerful enough on its own. It's for a large part about inspiring the idea of just behaving and executing your given steps, and you'll be fine.
One of the comments here makes it sound all so personal, as if that information never leaves the classroom and is only the domain of the teacher, but it isn't - it's shared with other teachers, heads of year, deputies and principals, school psychologists, government departments, and to some extent (usually in the aggregate) with parents.
Throw some automation in the mix for scale (along with all the issues with correct facial identification - which as teachers we're not immune to either!) and we have the same thing.
What's the point of going to school if all the world knowledge is in your pocket?
To learn how to apply said knowledge?
I keep thinking that this type of surveillance from China is all smoke and mirrors, to make it seem like they have more of a lock down than they actually do. Even if an automated person recognition/mood judgement system was 99% accurate for a public CCTV camera, that's 10 false positives per 1000 people, and consider how many people it would see a day. But I don't work in image/video processing, so idk. But I think it's harder than identifying crosswalks, fire hydrants, and storefronts.
Car makers also claim to work on detecting dozing off of drivers. What about it should be impossible? Detecting if eyes are open or shut sounds doable, unless everybody is wearing sunglasses.
The same applies for identifying dissidents.
Particularly to my Western values of freedom and privacy and individuality. Much of what China does seems like that. Horrible and anti-human.
What concerns me most however, is that this (and similar Orwellian schemes) might actually be truly effective, and our fixation in the West with individual liberties might not be competitive in the long run.
The goal of a society should not be "to be effective, efficient, and cost-justified". Other values must be considered.
Reducing population for instance is clearly not effective, because society that does it will be replaced with the neighbour that doesn't.
Putting criminals to death doesn't help much as well, and can harm when an innocent person is killed by mistake.
In this sense western values have been very effective so far, but as technology changes, they may need to change.
Personally i don't think that privacy by itself is a good thing, if there was a device allowing anyone to see video of any place at any time (eliminating all privacy) people would be better off.
Things get bad only if a small group that already had control over the society gets exclusive access to the information, further reducing the power of other groups. This is bad, because it reduces the complexity of the society and doesn't allow to explore more paths (which in the long run have always failed so far). But if the powerful group is smart enough it may still make society more effective, by reducing the crime and vandalism, by helping to develop better school programs etc.
So if western societies want to remain effective the answer can't be simply 'no cameras' it should be cameras plus better mechanisms for distributing the power of the state between more groups.
[0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/201409/all-eyes-...
The attitudes towards the type of things in this article are also much more positive from people I talk to in China. Not just random samples online, people that I know and trust. The social credit system for example, people are generally a bit uneasy about it (given the past of their country) but not against it, the practical impact that it can have to them seems like it's worth it.
Technology in general seems to be met with much less cynicism and doubt there than the UK.
So personally I think that I agree with the notion that these kinds of systems truly have the potential to be effective, and that somewhere like the UK is going to be incapable of harnessing them in the way that somewhere like China is. And as this becomes increasingly apparent the reaction that other countries will have will be interesting and perhaps scary. Will america become increasingly confrontational? Try to instigate something in Taiwan? Idk.
2025 is the year that I've chosen to wait until before I make a judgement as to how messed up things really are.
Humans, particularly politicians and young people, tend to have a high time preference. That is, they put more emphasis on the here and now over future deferred rewards and consequences. This means that if a strategy has good short term rewards, then people will often ignore the long-term effects. Even if you can show that the long-term effects are negative, they are likely to ignore it. Eg moving towards socialism. We have plenty of evidenced from past attempts that socialism is likely not going to work, but people still like advocating for such policies, because they have a positive impact in the short term.
In the brain-pan of this New Tower of Babel lived the man who was himself the Brain of Metropolis.
As long as the man over there, who was nothing but work, despising sleep, eating and drinking mechanically, pressed his fingers on the blue metal plate, which apart from himself, no man had ever touched, so long would the voice of the machine-city of Metropolis roar for food, for food, for food...
She wanted living men for food.
Then the living food came pushing along in masses. Along the street it came, along its own street which never crossed with other people's streets. It rolled on, a broad, an endless stream. The stream was twelve files deep. They walked in even step. Men, men, men--all in the same uniform, from throat to ankle in dark blue linen, bare feet in the same hard shoes, hair tightly pressed down by the same black caps.
And they all had the same faces. And they all appeared to be of the same age. They held themselves straightened up, but not straight. They did not raise their heads, they pushed them forward. They planted their feet forward, but they did not walk. The open gates of the New Tower of Babel, the machine center of Metropolis, gulped the masses down.
An snippet from Metropolis by Thea Von Harbou
This seems like it achieves something similar, just automatic. Yet it makes me uneasy. Why? Are human brains unable to cope with the benefits of technology if there's not a consciousness doing it? Or is there something inherently evil about this? Or could it be great if used ethically with ethical rules imposed on it (like, say, the data is never stored for more than an hour).
Ooh, hey, we have this data on where everybody sits, too- that's handy, since it gives you more information about the social graph of the student body. Reliably sitting next to a Bad Person? Maybe you need some investigating.
And if a professor is caught mentioning subversive information in a lecture? Who was paying attention more than usual during that part? They seem interested, don't they? Might need to give them a talking to, too.
Apparently some people have a stranger watch them work as a productivity hack [1].
Of course, consent makes all the difference.
One teacher managing their own classroom allows them to do it on their own terms, personalize their discipline/teaching style to fit the needs of the class, and form a 2-way relationship with the students. Everyone is more or less on the same page and understanding of how and why they're being disciplined, if it comes to that.
Cameras scanning everyone's face once a second and sending them off to who-knows-where for who-knows-what isn't just uncomfortable because it's a 1-way transfer of information with seemingly nothing to offer the students except paranoia, it's applying 19th/20th-century prison surveillance tactics to the classroom. A modern-day panopticon.
Do you ever question your line of work and what good can come from the facial recognition technology you help develop?
Keep in mind, FR is not rocket science. (Hell, rocket science is not "rocket science".) It is going to continue to be developed, it is going to be ubiquitous, and the ethics of those in the industry largely define the ethics of the industry itself. If people of good conscious are not in the industry, no ethical concerns will be raised when ethically debatable clients and applications arise. I am part of the good ethics contingent.