By Iram Khan.
As COVID-19 continues to subside in China, good news from one industry after another is making headlines. The latest being an unexpected jump in car sales. China Passenger Car Association (CPCA) has announced that premium and luxury car sales grew 28 percent year on year in May.
Javed Ali.
In the 5G race, China has made a new headway by launching the service commercially. The new-age, cutting edge, high-speed communication is now available in 50 cities across the country.
The service is only available in selected areas in the other two countries – the United States and South Korea – that offer 5G so far. Its grand rollout in China last week is unmatchable with what the others have achieved so far.
The launch comes against the backdrop of US efforts to challenge China’s 5G ambitions. When President Donald Trump said that “the race to 5G is on and America must win”, he probably wanted to reach the finishing line first by not letting his competitor play. As he banned Huawei, the leading Chinese 5G infrastructure provider, from acquiring US technology and from letting it deploy its network in the US, China’s plans appeared to have hit a wall.
Huawei’s profits received a blow after the US ban but did not fall to a level where they could hamper its deployment plans. Not all countries share the US’s concerns about the possibility of backdoors in Huawei’s hardware and have decided to continue contracting the company.
Huawei teamed up with China’s state-owned telecom operators, China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom, to bring 5G services to their subscribers inland and signed 60 contracts with carriers in other parts of the world.
As against the beliefs of President Trump, the 5G race is not something where a country has to lose for the other to win. The world is merely undergoing a technological upgrade that is, naturally, resulting in a competition. But history explains that 5G can be adopted through global cooperation just like technological upgrades of industrialization, computers and the internet were.
Foundation of the ultimate medium of connectivity, the internet, lies is international collaboration. As we are increasing the speed of our connections with each other and with things, the need for working together is all the more important.
The battle for technological supremacy stems global growth. It disallows developing countries to take advantage of the latest advancements in overcoming their problems. It also causes a diminishing of the cooperative spirit among the scientific community for employing their gains in tackling the day’s challenges.
Europe is very much cognizant of this fact. It refused to ban Huawei despite extensive pressure and continues to partner with Chinese companies for the 5G deployment. There is a learn-learn approach in their collaborations, lifting industries of both regions.
An unintended consequence of the 5G tussle between the US and China was an acceleration of the latter’s self-reliance efforts. Already acquiring an edge in the field of 5G, Chinese companies are now aiming to improve their chip-making capabilities. Since China is a major supplier of rare earth materials, it is only a matter of time that the hardware expertise of local companies rises at par with those in the US.
Even the commercial launch of 5G services has been ahead of the schedule. Previously planned for release in 2020, last week’s announcement by the state-owned telecom operators came as a surprise for many industry observers. The acceleration of self-reliance efforts was not anticipated to be progressing at this pace.
A major contributive factor in China making headway in 5G is innovation being a national policy. Although the service has been commercially launched just now, it has been in medical and research use for quite some time. Hospitals and medical institutions have been using it to carry out remote surgeries and intelligent locomotive systems have been using it to transmit data to their analyzing systems.
Owing to the innovation drive, top Chinese phone makers Huawei and Oppo have launched 5G enabled cell phones. US-based Apple is, however, yet to announce one.
That’s because China has a clearly defined roadmap of how it wants to leverage innovation to be the global tech leader. A plan released in 2016 states that by 2030 it will be able to achieve its aim.
The 5G race is not for a single country to win. It is the future of how mankind will connect. One nation’s win can be that of another as well. The need is to disengage from impeding achievements of perceived rivals and move forward with a joint multinational strategy.
In battling fake news, Thailand has just upped the ante. By unveiling a center dedicated to finding and reacting to fake news online, it has offered hope to witch hunt survivors and, at the same time, spooked free speech activists.
The stated areas in which the center will counter misinformation – and, of course, disinformation – are economy, finance, health, government policy and natural disasters. Whenever fake news will affect peace and security of the nation, the center will come into play.
Rights groups and opposition political parties have expressed strong resentment against the anti-fake news center. Fearing a silencing of government critics, they are calling it a censorship tool in the hands of a government that doesn’t qualify as a true democracy in their view.
Meanwhile, sending a sigh of relief, the ministers clarified that the center will not have any powers of arrest or legal action and later that it will not be “a tool to support the government or any individual”. If a false news item is detected through the center’s social listening system, it will be flagged to relevant authorities and corrections will be issued through the center’s social media platforms.
Like many Asian countries, literacy levels in Thailand are not as high as those in advanced nations. Social media usage, the main vehicle of fake news, is meanwhile extremely high. This combination offers a fertile ground for the spread of unverified information.
The developing world has been especially affected by the rise of fake news. A spate of lynchings in India, accusations on an array of entities in Sri Lanka after the Eastern bombings and, most distressingly, a genocide in Myanmar caused by the radicalization of a community otherwise considered peaceful.
Radicalism fueled by the internet is one of the main problems of the day since it quickly morphs to violence. Religious extremism in the Middle East was largely stimulated with propaganda content of extremists with half-baked facts mixed with entirely fabricated statistics.
In the developed world, radicalism has mostly been race-based, yet instilled majorly by the fake news machinery. The algorithms of social media websites, that mold our newsfeeds into what we are supposed to like the most, do not differentiate between a healthy and unhealthy piece of content. Running in a closed hamster wheel of consuming radical content has the power of reinforcing a perfectly sane individual’s fringe ideas into hardcore beliefs and turning him into an extremist.
On social media, the two most common sellable commodities are emotions and conspiracy theories. A growing number of people share news items without reading them because of strong emotions in the headlines or in the images attached with them. Likewise, conspiracy theories, sometimes outrageously intriguing, are shared by people thinking they are propagating a new angle to an issue or while simply considering themselves the first ones to break it to their social circle.
Thailand has its peculiar problems with fake news. With laws that criminalize defamation of the royal family, the spread of incorrect information has been a source of polarization in the society. The same has been creating problems during the times of natural disasters and financial crises.
Popular messaging apps in the country frequently hold “Stop Fake News” workshops aimed at enabling their users to stay safe on online platforms and check the propagation of “fake news” and misinformation.
When newspapers published false stories, their number was few and the public quickly earmarked them for resorting to such tactics.
Now, however, every social media user is a media outlet in himself. He can start publishing the moment he logs on to the internet and, with the right ingredients, spread information, right or wrong, across the world. This unfathomable volume of publishers makes it important to keep a check on falsehood and fight for the truth.
But who exactly is going to be the vanguard in the fight for the truth? Governments with their insatiable desires of stifling dissent and political opposition? Internet users with their influencing power behind a cloak of anonymity? Or the social media companies that have amassed powers on par with those of governments?
This is a paradox the world is presently stuck in. Whether to let free speech flow into realms of falsehood or to introduce checks that have the potential to be misused.
The biggest role in curbing fake news lies with the platforms that are used to spread them, – that is, the social media companies. In their quest for growth, they have expanded their user base to such a level that they are unable to moderate the content. Although Facebook boasts employing nearly 30,000 moderators it is still far from overcoming this problem.
The corporate sector worked hard to introduce a culture of social responsibility. But with the rise of internet 2.0, the preference of several companies shifted to expansion from their pledge to keep their customers in confidence.
After a considerable outrage over alleged foreign interference in the US presidential election of 2016, political advertising on social media has been a topic of fierce debate. Some candidates of the upcoming election have been accused of spreading lies in their advertisements, while others, to prove the point, deliberately put false information in their ads.
Seeing the pressure developing, Twitter has announced an end to political advertising on its platform. Since it too has a large user base with limited resources of fact-checking, this is a positive development.
Facebook, on the other hand, believes that it is for the citizens to decipher false information from the correct. Experts believe that the company cannot take this stance too far and will eventually succumb to the pressure building from politicians, media and its users.
Establishing anti-fake news centers and introducing truth checking mechanisms by governments is a measure in the right direction only if the right to free speech is not suppressed. Equally important is the citizens’ right to access correct information. And for that, the responsibility lies with the government.
The age of Artificial Intelligence in China has arrived. It is here, it is now and it is asking for more. The demand for talent is so high that the government had to push universities to promote AI education. Will the present generation, and the next, be able to match this drive is something that does seem possible, but the industry is growing and its appetite for human resource is voracious.
AI + X is an interdisciplinary approach being encouraged in universities to integrate AI with subjects like physics, sociology,psychology, biology, and mathematics among others. Dedicated AI departments have been introduced from Jilin to Nanjing and some universities are even collaborating with private companies to train their students. Apart from being teaching institutions, universities are also cradles of research and thus the vanguards of AI.
The industry itself is presenting a progressive outlook. Over4,000 firms in China today are AI-based and the government is looking for the business to exceed 1 trillion yuan by 2030. The capital Beijing with its entrepreneurial atmosphere is emerging as an AI hub. According to data from Beijing Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology (BMCEIT), the city hosts more than 1,070 AI companies which is 26 percent of the country’s count. 1,237 AI companies from around China have acquired venture investments and 431 out of these, or 35percent, are from Beijing.
Rokid, a well-funded startup from Hangzhou, is ready to mass produce its custom AI chip for voice recognition and is planning to create China’s first AI Operating System. The country’s largest carmaker, SAIC Motor, is also it’s first to launch an in-house AI lab.While focusing on cloud computing, big data, and business application, the Shanghai-headquartered company aims to put smart technology to use in automobile production, automobile products, rental service, and logistics.
Kunlun might be a famous mountain range in western China but it is the name of Baidu’s indigenous cloud-to-edge AI chip as well, which according to it’s CEO, has a computational capability 30 times faster than the latest field-programmable gate array based AI accelerator. Baidu Brain is another ambitious project by the tech giant, adding a human touch in machines to enable them to see, hear and understand better.
China’s extensive use of AI in the medical field is easing load from hospitals and improving skills of doctors.Alibaba in Shanghai, for instance, is not only using data for patient prediction and doctor allocation, but in Zhejiang it is developing AI-based diagnosis tools to analyze CT scans and MRIs. In a country where more than 2.7 million people give in to cancer each year, Tencent is developing Miying – an AI clinical diagnostic system which learns from big data, examines endoscopy images and gives feedback in 4 seconds with an accuracy reaching as high as 90 percent.
Pitched against AI last month, experienced physicians were seen at an euroimaging contest in Beijing. In the two rounds of diagnosing brain tumors and predicting hematoma expansion, an AI system named BioMind scored a clear2:0 win. This does not mean AI will one day be replacing the human doctor.Instead, it will only act how GPS does for a driver today.
AI companies are proving immenselyhelpful to the government in ensuring public security. SenseTime, a valuablestart-up, has installed vision and image recognition systems at multiple airports and railwaystations. A high-tech enterprise, CloudWalk Technology, has engaged with authorities in the mega Skynet Project to identify pedestrians and vehicles, worked with 23provinces and helped arrest almost 2,600 suspects. Hikvision, another producerof AI-powered systems and front-end cameras, also partnerswith local governments to provide facialrecognition and big data analysis.
2018 is a good year for AI enthusiasts inChina. Smart China Expo planned for August in the Chongqing municipality is expecting to “acceleratethe development of China’s AI industry”. The event will be marked withcompetitions, exhibitions and thematic activities aimed at integration ofinternet and big data. Later in September, Shanghai will host AI World 2018conference with the theme of “New Era of Artificial Intelligence”. Specialactivities to boost investment and research are planned for the event. Thecity’s deputy mayor believes that local AI industry will develop after furtherimprovement of intellectual property protection.
Since the State Council issued an AI development planlast year, China’s rapidly developing tech industry is fueling the massivegrowth of this new age technology. Latest privacy standards adopted in May anda new cybersecurity law are some of the measures taken toregulate its growth. While there are no reports of any large-scale data leak inthe country, citizens’ find their confidence in AI improving with major playersintending to provide opensource access to their platforms.
