Social capitalism and future of constant surveillance

Abstract

Planners assure us that smart-city projects can enhance our lives, by making traffic flow better for example. But a complex network of meters, sensors, and cameras associated with facial recognition systems means that we can track every move we make. Where Freedom will be. Megacities around the world–like Hong Kong, which showcased its blueprint last December–are competing to become smart cities, creating a more productive' intelligent' network. But what does it take for a city to become efficient? Smart City is a utopian idea born in late 1990s that describes the digitalization of urban infrastructure and the potential implementation of artificial intelligence to sensor-gathered information to mitigate metropolitan issues1 . Technology has answers to wide range of problems in areas like pollution, traffic control, and management of waste, as well as efficient energy use. San Francisco, Singapore and New York are currently the smartest cities in the world according to a report2 released in June 2019. Shenzhen, Beijing and the South Korean capital Seoul, however, are rapidly catching up. Another report3 released earlier last year found that China is running 500 smart city pilot projects – which are half of the total worldwide. Nanjing – an eastern city in China, collaborated with Germany-based SAP to build an intelligent traffic control system, and further one such project is under way. They took data from cabs and public buses — their GPS location, their operational speed — and used the video cameras’ data, traffic signals, mapped them into a traffic management system, and used that to develop roadwork decisions, traffic deviation and public transport re-routing. Now, consider a world where all of our daily activities are constantly monitored and evaluated: what do we buy online, what purchase I make while in a store, my whereabout, whom I am friends with and how often do we interact, when do I pay my bill, how do I manage my taxes, how much time I spend online on social media, which type of video games do I play, etc. It should not be hard to imagine, because most of this is already happening. The credit goes to the huge technology companies like Facebook, Google, Instagram, Fitbit and various other healthchecking apps. Now, consider a system where all our actions are given a rating - either positive or negative and further converted into a single number, as per the guidelines set by the government. This will result in a Citizen Specific Score and it will depict in the society whether one is trustworthy. Also, one’s ranking can be publicly measured against an entire population and can be used to assess one’s eligibility for a job, whether one’s kids can go to school-or not. This is perhaps a vision of Big Brother going out of control, and it is already happening in China, The Chinese government has developed a Social Credit System (SCS) to rate the trustworthiness of its citizens. They are propagating the system as a way to calculate and calculate "trust" nationwide and trying to build a culture of "sincerity". Their drafted policy states, "This will help develop a climate of public opinion in which preserving faith is glorious. And will strengthen honesty in policy matters, economic integrity, social sincerity and the building of judicial reputation." India is also planning to roll-out the world's largest face recognition system program in 2020. NCRB issued an RFP calling out bids for supply, installation, testing and commissioning of a pan India FRS. As per their 160-pager docket, this system will have a centralized web database hosted at NCRB Data Center, Delhi. This will be made available for use to all the police stations. This will help automatically identify citizens via CCTV footage and images. NCRB emphasises that this will help police catch miscreants, identify dead bodies and find missing people. There is news of Uighurs community in China, who are kept under strict surveillance via CCTV and Social Credit System. The question of the hour is – Is our freedom governed by the Technology? Are we enslaved by technology which was developed for our benefit? Where do we go from here?