A.I. revisits “1984”

YOMI MAKANJUOLA, PhD

Yomi Makanjuola earned a doctorate in Materials Engineering and Design and worked primarily as an Associate Partner at Accenture in Nigeria. Currently, he is an author and freelance consultant in the UK. His most recent book titled “Nigeria Like A Rolling Stone” is available on the Amazon platform (https:amzn.eu/d/8STPZ0n). He can be reached at 9yoma9@gmail.com”

1984 is now forty years in our rear-view mirror. Yet it remains a synonym for totalitarianism, as currently practised in North Korea and, to a lesser extent, Cuba. As a reminder, the book titled “1984” was published by George Orwell in 1949, two years after the start of the Cold War. After vanquishing German Nazism in 1945, the relationship between two former World War II allies – the nuclear-armed U.S. and Communist Soviet Union – was heading for the deep freeze.

By 1989, the Soviet Union had imploded, and a unipolar world emerged under the sway of the U.S. Prematurely, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared “the end of history” by suggesting that liberal democracy had triumphed as the climactic mode of government. However, by 2024, autocratic and populist regimes had pushed back and begun reshaping the global order. Since “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” time-shifting “1984” appears to be allergic to the dustbin of history.

Notably, the totalitarian vision of absolute control, as depicted in Orwell’s fictional state of Oceania, is alive today. Far from being satirical, the dark arts of repression employed by Adolf Hitler’s secret police, the Gestapo, and Joseph Stalin’s pernicious NKVD may seem quaint. But this is only because the technology available to dictators in 2024 is of a different order of sophistication. At the current pace of innovation, headlined by Neuralink’s brain chip-implantation milestone, the methodology of Orwell’s “Thought Police” might someday be upgraded from BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU to BIG BROTHER IS BUGGING ¡YOU!.

My previous article titled “Artificial Intelligence 101” surmised that AI was analogous to a black box, with intrinsic capabilities that have attracted the attention of governments. While the mainstream AI narrative highlights the tremendous upsides for productivity improvement, pessimists have focused on the presumptive ceding of human control to autonomous AI systems. Perhaps less attention has been paid to how much AI will turbocharge George Orwell’s dire predictions, characterised by malevolent governments sanctioning mass surveillance and mind control.

To netizens, “Big Brother” probably evokes a reality television concept. Decades in the making, the proliferation of public cameras and assorted databases in the West seemed like an acceptable price to pay for enhanced security and better social services. However, with AI, surveillance capabilities will soar into the stratosphere. While advanced democracies weigh up the pros and cons of “Big Brotherism,” the lurking danger for Nigeria and other technology laggards is that they might end up with all the downsides, and few of the benefits.

Meanwhile, China, Russia, and several illiberal governments are harnessing coercion and leveraging AI tools to smother domestic dissent. In China, particularly, data collected from citizens and businesses is processed to track “trustworthiness” and to generate a social credit score for whitelisting and blacklisting. Furthermore, Chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE have been exporting ultra-modern facial, voice, and gait recognition AI technology to all-comers. These include certain countries that are least able to afford the gear, such as Zimbabwe and Venezuela.

Under the guise of government-to-government co-operation, Chinese vendors install high-resolution video cameras at airports, railway and bus stations from where information is harvested and stored in databases, and then filtered with “policing” software. Complementary resources include advanced biometrics, listening devices and location-tracking systems, which facilitate clandestine operations. The advent of deepfake technology, that makes it ever more difficult to authenticate multimedia content, beclouds a planet where people are tethered to their smartphones.

Cleverly, most of these technology companies market their offerings under the banner of “safe city solutions,” synced to interconnected devices and cloud resources. In poorer countries lacking proper checks and balances, usually China agrees to install, operate and manage their networks. Geopolitically, the Chinese Communist Party seems intent on weakening democratic societies, by advancing tools for political and social control abroad. Disturbingly, tranches of surveillance data amassed in some countries are being transmitted back to China, presumably for further processing. How convenient!

Even in America, the U.S. Congress has just woken up to the alleged risks posed by the popular social-media app, TikTok, of which the Chinese government has tangential control. Alert or not, Nigeria is equally susceptible to foreign powers hawking opaque electronic gadgets. As a consequence, seemingly innocuous institutions like banks and telecommunications companies could become Trojan horses through which private data is collected and manipulated.

To be clear, not only Chinese companies export AI surveillance technology. Western companies like IBM and Cisco are also in the game, but government-backed Chinese entities are far more aggressive. If Nigeria is not yet fully on board, the reason could be down to the country’s epileptic power supply making the mass rollout of surveillance infrastructure unfeasible. Still, where there is a will, there is often a way.

Unless individuals and the civil society wake up to this surreptitious incursion, fundamental human rights and civil liberties could be in serious jeopardy. Left unchallenged, the ubiquitous state structure portrayed in “1984” might seduce opportunistic robo-autocrats to crush all opposition and abet tyranny.

Upshot: Resist Orwell’s blasphemous “infallible and all-powerful” avatar, either from the East or West.

• business a.m. commits to publishing a diversity of views, opinions and comments. It, therefore, welcomes your reaction to this and any of our articles via email: comment@businessamlive.com