By the 2020s, the Chinese
government had made significant advances in applying computer technology to
garden-variety surveillance. To do so, that government relied to a significant
extent on Chinese companies, and this in turn encouraged innovation at those
companies even for non-governmental applications. I contend that treating this
as a case study in business and government, without bringing in the ethical and
political implications is a mistake. The ostensive “objectivity” of empirical
social science may seem like an objective for scholars, but I submit that
bringing in political and ethical theory renders the analysis superior to that
which political economy alone can provide.
The full essay is at "On the Ethics of China's Use of AI Facial-Recognition."
