China’s AI Woes. Lots of Data but No One to Work it?
Although China is on a path to have its AI industry valued at over $10 billion by 2020, several experts have identified that the country may still struggle with actually implementing this new AI.
How could this be though?
China collects data from over 840 million Chinese internet users making them the biggest online population on the planet. Yet, the data is of questionable quality, because there are not enough people tag, label, or “clean” it. China’s apparent lack of technology talent is actually making it harder to use and implement the massive amount of data at their disposal.
These concerns were posited in the China AI Development white paper which was jointly released by International Data Corp (IDC), a technology research firm, and Chinese technology media outlet Qbitai.com. Of the 143 domestic AI industry insiders surveyed in the paper, 60% of them say the implementation of AI technologies will be very difficult, not because they don’t have enough data, but because there aren’t enough people to label and qualify the information. This makes it harder for the information gathered to be specific enough to be useable.
Until the data is analyzed thoroughly, no one can actually use it to identify patterns that machines can then use to better teach themselves. The paper’s findings were released just months after Vice President Mike Pence spoke with several Chinese activists about blacklisting eight major Chinese AI companies over fear that they will continue human rights violations against Muslims and other religious minorities in the Xinjiang territory.
"You've got a high-tech system being used to monitor people, where you've done massive data collection of DNA samples of the entire population, where you implement a 'social credit score' system to prohibit people from getting certain places," Sam Brownback, the U.S. envoy in charge of international religious freedom, told Nikkei.
China has long struggled with matters of religious freedom, and like Brownback, many believe that the big DNA data push in Xinjiang could make matters of religious oppression even worse.
Somewhere between 800,000 and 2 million Uighurs have been detained in Xinjiang since April 2017. The US Congressional-Executive Commission on China also noted in the past that close to 1,000 of the people are being detained by the Chinese government for a number of religion based offenses.
Despite talk of US sanctions, China still accounted for 12 percent of the global AI market in 2019.