UK cyber spy chief warns China’s tech power could allow it to ‘control the global operating system’ for 21st century
- GCHQ director Jeremy Fleming said China was ‘bringing all elements of state power to control, influence design and dominate markets’
- ‘But designed without liberal values, they could be used to enable significant intrusions into the lives of citizens and companies,’ he said
The West must urgently act to ensure that China does not dominate the key technologies of the 21st century or the communist state could effectively grab control of the world’s global “operating system”, Britain’s top cyber spy said.
Britain’s spies believe that China could within decades dominate all of the key emerging technologies of this century, particularly artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and genetics.
In an unusually blunt speech on Friday, GCHQ director Jeremy Fleming said that the West faces a moment of reckoning unless it takes profound action to ensure technologies that define its prosperity are not controlled by competitors such as China or Russia.
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“Significant technology leadership is moving East,” Fleming said in a speech to Imperial College. “The concern is that China’s size and technological weight means that it has the potential to control the global operating system. We are now facing a moment of reckoning.”
Fleming outlined a future over which world powers are competing to shape by developing the best technology, buying the best brains and dominating the global standards that will govern the technologies of the future.
GCHQ, which gathers communications from around the world to identify and disrupt threats to Britain, has a close relationship with the US National Security Agency as well as with the eavesdropping agencies of Australia, Canada and New Zealand in a consortium called Five Eyes.