Zeynep Tufekci has an
interesting new piece that asks whether censorship and surveillance caused Xi Jinping to underestimate the seriousness of coronavirus. This is potentially an important rejoinder to the argument that AI, by enabling a “panopticon” state, is a pro-authoritarian technology (
see previous discussion and
this Henry Farrell piece).
Tufekci argues that one of the second order effects of a surveillance society is that people act strategically to minimise the chance of punishment - and so their behaviour (and the data it generates) ceases to be a good guide for policy. If there’s a strong incentive to suppress bad news, you won’t hear bad news, even when you need to (There are echoes of the problem of central planning, discussed below).
There’s an interesting connection here to Amartya Sen’s (
contested) argument that
famines don’t happen in democracies. According to Sen, famines aren’t about resources or technology, but are
political failures of planning and responsiveness. China has demonstrated
extraordinary powers in response to the virus, but perhaps its initial spread is a fascinating and tragic example of the costs of state
over-capacity.