The other AI

In March, the Reuters news agency published a review of more than 2,000 Russian court cases showing that security-camera footage and facial-recognition technology had been used in the arrests of hundreds of people. Initially, authorities were using the technology to identify and detain people who’d joined various anti-government demonstrations, but after the invasion of Ukraine last year, they started using it to intercept protesters and prevent them from demonstrating at all. Now they’re using it to spot and whisk away opponents of the Kremlin whenever they want. It’s a remarkable capability—and just one that autocrats are developing with technologies powered by artificial intelligence to clamp down on their populations. How far can these capabilities go?

Steven Feldstein is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of The Rise of Digital Repression: How Technology Is Reshaping Politics, Power, and Resistance. As Feldstein explains, repression-enabling AI applications have become key elements of the authoritarian repertoire around the world. Autocrats have invested heavily in them because—although they’ve insulated their power and rolled back democratic movements in recent years—they understand that the biggest standing threat to that power is still their own people, either rising up in revolutions or voting them out in elections. And the biggest emerging opportunity to control people is by connecting the digital environments they increasingly live in to state surveillance systems powered by AI …

John Jamesen Gould: How have autocrats been using artificial intelligence?

Steven Feldstein: There was a moment in the early 2010s when new digital-information and -communication platforms—social-media applications, especially—had started to play a remarkable role in helping civilians around the world mobilize and challenge the authoritarians they were living under. We saw this from the “color revolutions” in post-Soviet Eurasia through the Arab Spring. And it led to a lot of optimism that these liberation technologies—as they were called—would help propel a new wave of democratic revolutions globally.