China’s security chief calls for greater use of AI to predict terrorism, social unrest
Artificial intelligence can complete tasks with a ‘precision and speed unmatchable by humans’, official says
China’s domestic security and intelligence chief has called on the country’s police to use artificial intelligence to improve their ability to predict and prevent terrorism and social unrest.
Meng Jianzhu, head of the Communist Party’s central commission for political and legal affairs in charge of the country’s massive security and intelligence systems, pledged at a meeting in Beijing on Tuesday to use AI through machine learning, data mining and computer modelling to help stamp out risks to stability.
“Artificial intelligence can complete tasks with a precision and speed unmatchable by humans, and will drastically improve the predictability, accuracy and efficiency of social management,” Meng was quoted as saying by Chinese news website Thepaper.cn on Thursday.
Meng said security forces should study patterns that might be spotted in cases of terrorist attacks and public security incidents and build a data analysis model to improve the authorities’ ability to predict and stop such events taking place.
The idea has echoes of Steven Spielberg’s science fiction thriller Minority Report, in which the authorities use technology and genetic mutation to predict when and where crimes will take place.