China has a plan to assimilate most of the world’s population into a virtual empire dominated by its telecommunications, computation, manufacturing, and logistics. China is proud of what it has accomplished at home and what it proposes to accomplish globally, reports NR.
5G Broadband Changes Everything
5G broadband is the key — the key that unlocks hundreds of doors in the world of 21st-century technology.
U.S. officials warn that Huawei might steal Western data on behalf of China’s intelligence services. That really is beside the point. Spy agencies always exaggerate the importance of secrets; after all, they trade in secrets, and they are as eager to talk up the value of their merchandise as anyone else. Whether Huawei has the capacity to steal data or not is a secondary issue. It plans to persuade the world to give up its data for free, the way Tom Sawyer persuaded his friends to whitewash his fence.
Take the case of health care, which now composes 10 percent of the GDP of the world’s developed nations and may become the world’s single biggest industry as an aging population requires more medical services. Huawei will provide users with a sensor that plugs into a smartphone and slips over the index finger, taking your oxygen level, heart rate, temperature, and blood pressure. Another smartphone sensor will take an electrocardiogram. You will upload your vital signs and heart status to your smartphone, and from there to the Cloud, along with your digitized health records, family health history, and — before long — a genetic analysis of your DNA to detect a predisposition to stroke or heart attack.
Huawei’s artificial-intelligence servers will slice and dice your data and cross-grid your information with hundreds of millions of case histories. Your phone will beep if the risk of heart attack or stroke hits a certain probability, and an optional app will have a car-service driver en route to take you to the nearest emergency room. Huawei expects to have half a billion people linked to its Cloud servers within ten years. Why wouldn’t you offer up your data? Of course, you will have helped Huawei create a database for medical research that will force every medical research organization in the world to conduct its experiments on Huawei servers.
China’s medical application of information technology had a test of fire in early 2020, when the coronavirus epidemic burst out of Hubei province and threatened to engulf the country. According to Chinese business executives familiar with the exercise, the Chinese government and information-technology companies matched locational data for hundreds of millions of smartphones to the results of mass testing for infection, in what appears to be the largest artificial-intelligence application on record.
Chinese government algorithms can estimate the probability that a given neighborhood, or even an individual, has exposure to COVID-19 by correlating the location of smartphones to known locations of infected individuals or groups. The authorities use this information to deploy limited medical resources more efficiently by, for example, directing tests for the virus to high-risk subjects identified by the artificial-intelligence algorithm.
During the past several years, the Chinese government has combined smartphone locational data with facial recognition, making it easy to verify that the person carrying the phone is the registered user. China also uses electronic records of medicine purchases to identify sick individuals who may have attempted to flee quarantine.
Tencent’s WeChat messaging app allows users to take their temperature and other vital signs and send them to the Cloud in real time. Chinese citizens in quarantine were required to use a smartphone app to monitor their medical condition. An algorithm determines when the user is healthy enough to leave isolation and creates a “healthy status” page that users must display to gain entry to public buildings and shopping malls. South Korea employed smartphone apps to warn users when they were in proximity to a possible source of infection, but the Korean system is not as comprehensive, nor as intrusive.
Medical services already compose 18 percent of America’s GDP, compared to 11 percent for manufacturing and 6 percent for housing — and as America’s population ages, health care’s share of the economy will continue to grow. The triad of smartphones, fast broadband, and artificial intelligence will transform medicine in ways we can only begin to imagine.
In principle, China’s virtual empire is just an extension of what Facebook, Google, and Amazon have been doing for years. They don’t steal your data, although you may not be aware of how much personal information you hand over to them every day. You give them your data in exchange for services that make your personal life more convenient and your business life more productive.
Google’s advertising revenues in the second quarter of 2019 topped $27 billion, while Facebook took in $17 billion. Google’s efforts to apply the same methods to other fields than advertising haven’t worked out as well. American companies spend $200 billion a year on advertising, the bread and butter of Google’s business. But Americans spent almost 20 times as much — $3.65 trillion — on health care in 2018, roughly one-fifth of the entire U.S. economy.
The Control Point
Paul Scanlan became chief technology officer of Huawei Technologies in 2016. If you look 20 years ahead, I asked him, and if everything goes the way you would like it to go, what do you think the world will look like, and what do you think Huawei will have done to change it?
Paul Scanlan replied, “We’re looking for what’s called the control point.” He explained, “This is what we mean by the control point. We don’t want to do everything ourselves. If you are a pharmaceutical company, you won’t have to duplicate our investment in AI. You simply rent time on the Cloud, using our AI servers, and obtain access to our data. The key is gathering and porting the data to servers where it can be put into usable form. That’s our contribution. We don’t want to control everything. We want partners who are best in class in every field.”
The Machines Become Sentient
The combination of machine learning and 5G will allow robots to talk to each other and work out production processes without the help of human engineers, Paul enthused.
Huawei’s chief partner in robotics is ABB, the world’s largest maker of industrial robots, with more than 400,000 machines installed worldwide.
Sentient industrial robots that design their own production procedures, robo-surgery by remote control, and augmented-reality mining coal may sound like science fiction, but Huawei and its partners — the heavyweights of the medical technology and robotics world — have already built the technology. If we fell into a coma and woke up ten years from now, we wouldn’t recognize some basic industries.
Huawei is building the world’s biggest Cloud computing capacity and racing to design the world’s fastest artificial-intelligence processors. And behind Huawei stands the Chinese government’s massive commitment to supercomputing, and — most ominously — to quantum computing.
The conversation with Huawei’s Paul Scanlan was a blast of cold air. Americans are busy with the valuation of competing providers of streaming video, the relative merits of e-commerce platforms at Amazon and Walmart, and the profitability of the 110th smartphone dating app. The Chinese want to transform the way we live. They do the physics, and we do the apps. We are becoming geeks in a new Roman Empire.
Did you subscribe to our daily Newsletter?
It’s Free! Click here to Subscribe
Source: NR
