Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming not only economies, but how law enforcement and surveillance are conducted. The People's Republic of China (PRC) has rolled out the largest AI-based public-surveillance system in the world and handed over to AI ever more of the tasks that human police officers once handled. Like drone pilots, police in Chinese cities increasingly sit in command centers looking at screens that allow them to monitor and manage public security using data aggregated, sifted, and visualized by AI. Human officers would command and coordinate police units based on such data, but improved large language models (LLMs) are taking over this "back-end" role. On the streets, Chinese advances in robotics mean that AI-governed robots will move from their current role supporting human security personnel and start directly arresting dissidents.
On the tactical level, AI is increasingly able to run the whole law-enforcement cycle: gathering information, deploying units, commanding, planning, and patrolling. On the strategic level, AI's impact on the PRC surveillance state is even more profound. Technology has made massive data integration possible not only within cities, but on the level of whole provinces and indeed the entire country (rural and wild areas included). The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will soon be setting up a national digital command center. The current PRC surveillance state is corrupt, costly, and takes a lot of human effort to run. The CCP wants one that will require little human participation, being "staffed" instead by AI working through drones, autonomous vehicles, and humanoid robots.
You can read the full article by Valentin Weber in the Journal of Democracy here.
