Monitoring and following up on data this is how China excels in technology

Whoever owns the data runs the world

China has surpassed Western countries in the field of technology, specifically in everything related to monitoring systems and data processing, while it is working hard to become a leading country in the field of artificial intelligence technology, in light of the escalation of tensions between it and the United States, which sees Beijing as a fierce competitor that may threaten its technical influence. And its national security and exposes it to systematic espionage campaigns and cyber wars.

Western voices warning of the repercussions of China's technological progress, whether in the military or in the field of communications, are calling to confront China's plans to become a world leader in artificial intelligence by 2025, to challenge the American dominance of the sector.

Last year, the giant Asian country had 214 of the world's 500 most powerful supercomputers, compared to 113 in the United States and 91 in the European Union, at a time when expert reports warn that China has become a leader in monitoring and processing people's data.

These warnings reinforced the fears of many Western countries that rushed to impose restrictions or bans on the use of the fifth generation network equipment for communications produced by the Chinese company Huawei in communications infrastructure projects in those countries.

Local domination

Western countries fear that China will exploit this technological equipment to spy on it. On the other hand, China is seeking to showcase its capabilities in the field of technology, especially artificial intelligence, as the Chinese state TV channel CGTN broadcast a short documentary film online, showing how artificial intelligence technology is used to identify wanted persons for security services, or violators of the rules on the streets of the city. Shenzhen, arrest them immediately.

Technology writer Tim Colban believes that this film does not reveal great technical capabilities that allow China to impose its hegemony abroad, as much as it shows its ability to control its citizens at home.

It can be said that China and the United States are moving shoulder-to-shoulder in the field of artificial intelligence in terms of scientific publishing. China surpasses the United States in terms of the volume of citations for its research in scientific journals, thanks to

The abundance of Chinese publications in these areas, while the United States greatly excels in terms of the quality of research presented to scientific conferences, according to a recent report issued by the American Stanford University.

In a report published by Bloomberg News Agency, Colban says that although China, which has the largest population in the world, is a superpower in the field of artificial intelligence, investors and observers of China should not bet too much on the idea that its position cannot be outdone or that the United States is weaker than it.

At the same time, an overestimation of each other's strengths by China and the United States could lead to a Cold War-style AI arms race of the last century.

Nicholas Shaylan, who recently quit his job as head of the US Air Force's Computer Programs Department after three years in it, says China is advancing toward a dominant position in the world thanks to its advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning and cybersecurity.

But Coleban sees China's expertise in artificial intelligence as being concentrated in a limited range, compared to the field's many sub-sectors. Such as machine learning, robotics, natural language processing, and computational vision. in

When the United States has great capabilities in various of these sub-fields thanks to the major companies operating in this field such as Google, Amazon.com, Facebook, and Microsoft, most of China's expertise and progress is confined to surveillance systems and citizen data processing.

Relative progress

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According to technical assessments by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, Chinese algorithms in the field of artificial intelligence excel greatly when it comes to analyzing surveillance data such as forensic imaging, border control images and visa images.

Also, more than half of Chinese scientific papers published in the field of artificial intelligence last year focused on systems that are often used in monitoring, according to data collected by the Microsoft Academic Graph service and analyzed by Sixth Ton China, while the number of Chinese papers remains in the fields of machine learning and language processing. Nature and robotics are much lower than the papers published by the United States, Britain, Germany and India.

At the same time, most of the revenues of Chinese AI technology companies are related to governments and their desire to monitor people. About half of the revenue from SenseTime, which plans to float on the Hong Kong stock exchange, came from the government's "SmartCity" project to popularize smart surveillance systems in China. About 64 percent of Megvi Technology's revenue comes from its contracts to supply surveillance technology to Chinese local governments.

In contrast, the applications of AI technology in the United States are more diverse. The United States has the lead in the areas of machine learning, which is the most important. Also, most of the technologies used on a large scale in the world were developed by American companies; Like Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

Colban says that if China wants to occupy an undisputed position in the field of artificial intelligence technology, it must reduce its interest in people monitoring techniques, and increase its interest in technologies that can replace the human element at work, ensuring an increase in efficiency and effectiveness.

But China may have another point of view in this regard. The superiority in the field of monitoring and following up on data, from indexing to understanding and analysis, will provide it with new and exciting opportunities to manage large amounts of information, and thus control more of the technology and competition in this field between it and the United States. And between it and Western countries in general.

The assessment report for the year 2020-2021 for the development of China's computing power for artificial intelligence, jointly issued by the International Data Corporation, a global market research company, and the Insber Group for the supply of cloud computing and big data, indicated that China will become a major catalyst for the growth of global artificial intelligence and will contribute 15.6 percent. market size by 2024.