You are a European researcher concerned to protect your country and Europe and other possible targets of Chinese aggression from that aggression. Given the opportunity, do you a) collaborate with Chinese researchers funded by the Chinese military on research that could be used to build automatic targeting systems or b) avoid such a collaboration?
What if the research were about “Cross Ethnicity Anti-Spoofing Recognition” or “Containment of Rumor Spread in Complex Social Networks”? Would you have to be told that the Chinese state is extremely interested in increasing the scope and capacity of technological means of surveillance and censorship? If you did clearly understand this, would you care?
David Matthews reports for Science|Business (November 21, 2023):
Academics in Europe are continuing to work with Chinese counterparts on “clearly problematic” artificial intelligence (AI) research in areas like biometric surveillance, cybersecurity, and military fields, a new analysis has found….
Earlier this year, [European] Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said that technology cooperation with China shouldn’t benefit its military.
But judging from the Merics report [“AI entanglements: Balancing risks and reward of European-Chinese collaboration”], Europe has a long way to go before this aim becomes a reality.
Between 2017 and 2022, European researchers published more than 16,000 AI-related papers with Chinese colleagues based at institutions and universities either directly controlled by, or closely tied to, the Chinese military, it found.
Matthews focuses on morally objectionable European collaborations with China. But U.S. researchers are even more prolific collaborators. As Merics points out:
Measured by the publication of AI research results, China and the United States are each other’s top partners. Between 2010 and 2021, according to one database, there were 64,325 such Chinese-US co-authored publications, nearly triple UK-US ones, the next-highest quantity. China-born researchers have played a crucial role in advancing US AI research. Although Washington imposed export restrictions on leading Chinese AI companies, limited exports of AI-relevant semiconductor technology to China and prepares to screen certain US outbound investments in Chinese AI firms, the two countries’ industrial ecosystems remain deeply enmeshed.
Sometimes the abetting of tyranny is more direct. U.S. technology firms have supplied China with much of the technology that it uses to censor the Internet, monitor targeted populations like the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and monitor an airport that is “one of the few international gateways into and out of Xinjiang.”
