The tech journalist Ross Andersen has written in The Atlantic that soon “Chinese algorithms will be able to string together data points from a broad range of sources—travel records, friends and associates, reading habits, purchases—to predict political resistance before it happens.” With every new breakthrough, with every AI advance, China gets closer to its version of the holy grail: a system that can eliminate not just the words “democracy” and “Tiananmen” from the internet but the thinking that leads people to become democracy activists or attend public protests in real life.
