Artificial intelligence technology and autocratic regimes may be mutually reinforcing:
Recent scholarship has suggested that artificial intelligence (AI) technology
Martin Beraja and others, AI-tocracy, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 138, Issue 3, August 2023, Pages 1349–1402, https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjad012
and autocratic regimes may be mutually reinforcing. We test for a mutually reinforcing
relationship in the context of facial-recognition AI in China. To do so, we
gather comprehensive data on AI firms and government procurement contracts,
as well as on social unrest across China since the early 2010s. We first show that
autocrats benefit from AI: local unrest leads to greater government procurement
of facial-recognition AI as a new technology of political control, and increased AI
procurement indeed suppresses subsequent unrest. We show that AI innovation
benefits from autocrats’ suppression of unrest: the contracted AI firms innovate
more both for the government and commercial markets and are more likely to
export their products; noncontracted AI firms do not experience detectable negative
spillovers. Taken together, these results suggest the possibility of sustained
AI innovation under the Chinese regime: AI innovation entrenches the regime,
and the regime’s investment in AI for political control stimulates further frontier
innovation.
But make no mistake. Informational autocrats are everywhere on the rise:
____________________
Featured Image: Lexica
Mind the Post 