ASSESSING CHINA’S POLICY THINKING ON AI DEVELOPMENT

Resumo

The rapid technological development of China, especially when it concerns to its strategic interests in artificial intelligence, has often been assessed as a disruptive threat to the global order and to the balance of international power. However, recent documents released in China seem to present a view that deviates from the simple winner-takes-all framework. Indeed, they illustrate an innovative approach to ethics and governance in artificial intelligence, which demonstrates China's intention to build a legal basis for dialogue with the international community. Thus, this article aims to answer the following question: What is the Chinese policy view on the development of artificial intelligence technologies? This paper proposes to use both qualitative and quantitative methods to answer the research question. First of all, we are going to carry out a brief document analysis of the Chinese documents that dealt with national plans to booster artificial intelligence industry from 2015 until 2017. Second, to provide a systematic analysis of Chinese thinking on the subject, we will do a content analysis of the documents dealing with issues of ethics, security, and governance in the use of artificial intelligence produced in 2018 and recently in 2019. Contrary to the zero-sum game that results from a skeptical look at China’s technological ambitions, these documents show that there may in fact be many areas of mutual interest the international community should discuss and build a legal framework regarding safe and ethical AI. Many issues discussed in the paper, such as algorithmic model defects and training data bias, are the same issues raised in the democratic discourse around safe and ethical AI. Advancing global norms and standards in these areas may, therefore, stand to be a win-win relation.

KEYWORDS: Artificial Intelligence (AI), China’s Strategy, AI’s governance, Ethics