When Liu went on vacation with his fiancée (now his wife) to Thailand, they paid at restaurants and bought trinkets with Alipay. He added friends in Alipay’s built-in social network. He booked doctors’ appointments there, skipping the chaotic lines for which Chinese hospitals are famous.
He started making his car insurance payments with the app.
#China tracking and scoring citizens license
He realized that he could pay for parking through Alipay’s My Car feature, so he added his driver’s license and license plate numbers, as well as the engine number of his Audi. Alipay’s slogan summed up the experience: “Trust makes it simple.”Īlipay turned out to be so convenient that Liu began using it multiple times a day, starting first thing in the morning, when he ordered breakfast through a food delivery app. Alipay had built a reputation for reliability, and compared to going to a bank managed with slothlike indifference and zero attention to customer service, signing up for Alipay was almost fun. To get an Alipay ID, Liu had to enter his cell phone number and scan his national ID card. One day, at a vegetable market, he watched a woman his mother’s age pull out her phone to pay for her groceries. Cash, Liu could see, had been largely replaced by two smartphone apps: Alipay and WeChat Pay. At McDonald’s, the convenience store, even at mom-and-pop restaurants, his friends in Shanghai used mobile payments. "I think it’s really concerning because the universities have no way of ensuring the tech they’re helping these develop and improve are going to be used in ethical ways.In 2015, when Lazarus Liu moved home to China after studying logistics in the United Kingdom for three years, he quickly noticed that something had changed: Everyone paid for everything with their phones. "Scientists like. . .those who visited Princeton are among the thousands of officers and cadres who have been sent abroad as PhD students or visiting scholars in the past decade.
It's also sending scientists to western universities in order to obtain overseas expertise in AI.Īlex Joske, a researcher studying the Chinese Communist party at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, reportedly said there are thousands of scientists with links to the Chinese army that have travelled to western universities in recent years. The US and China are dominating the world's AI "race" but China is investing heavily in order to get an edge. "These were academic papers written by researchers at universities - Google is not involved with these projects and has no partnerships with the Chinese universities in question,” a Google spokesperson reportedly said. Google is reportedly distancing itself from studies where its staff teamed up with researchers and corporations in China.
Their paper can be found here. Funkhouser declined to comment. The trio looked at how computer vision research can be used in unmanned drones and autonomous underwater vehicles. Thomas Funkhouser, a Google senior staff research scientist, worked with two visiting NUDT scientists when he was a visiting professor at Princeton University last year. Interestingly, four of the US academics are affiliated with Google. All of them declined to comment, according to the FT. The researchers in the US have links to organisations like Nokia Bell Labs, Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and University of Sydney in Australia. The research partnerships identified by the FT leave the western academics complicit in China’s human rights abuses, possibly inadvertently. Human rights campaigners have taken particular issue with how the Chinese government is using surveillance technology to target Uighurs in the region of Xinjiang, and there are widespread concerns that Beijing has gone too far in terms of surveillance - references to a Big Brother state or George Orwell's "1984" are common.
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