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12. Japan’s Aging Society as a Technological Opportunity
- Author:
- Ken Kushida
- Publication Date:
- 10-2024
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
- Abstract:
- Japan’s extreme demographic aging and shrinking is an economic and societal challenge, but also a technological opportunity for global leadership. Technological trajectories of worker automation and worker skill augmentation within Japan are already being shaped by the country’s demographics. Software, robotics, and other technology deployments are transforming the nature of work in a wide range of sectors in Japan’s economy, and across types of work such as blue-collar, white-collar, agriculture, manufacturing, and services. Specific ways in which Japan’s demographics shape technological trajectories include market opportunities, acute labor shortages, and favorable political and regulatory dynamics. The private sector is driving technology deployments in industrial sectors hit hard by Japan’s aging population, ranging from construction and transportation to medical care and finance, with strong government support in each of the domains. Demographically driven technological trajectories play to Japan’s strengths in implementing, deploying, and improving technologies rather than generating breakthrough innovations. Japan’s demographically driven technological trajectory can be an important platform for international technology cooperation, fitting with the top U.S.-Japanese political leadership agreements on fostering strong innovation and technology collaboration ties. Japan’s start-up ecosystem, often in partnership with large incumbent firms, will be critical in deploying new technologies by defining new markets and providing new offerings. An effective analysis goes beyond broad demographic numbers to delve into specific pain points of particular segments of society to better capture their situations and roles in shaping market opportunities that drive technological adoption. This introductory paper: (1) defines key analytical concepts; (2) surveys some of Japan’s key demographic shifts; and (3) highlights cases from agriculture, construction, transportation, healthcare, eldercare, land, and housing ownership.
- Topic:
- Demographics, Science and Technology, Innovation, and Aging
- Political Geography:
- Japan and Asia
13. Why Does the Global Spyware Industry Continue to Thrive? Trends, Explanations, and Responses
- Author:
- Steven Feldstein and Brian (Chun Hey) Kot
- Publication Date:
- 03-2023
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
- Abstract:
- The global spyware and digital forensics industry continues to grow despite public backlash following an array of surveillance scandals, many linked to NSO Group’s Pegasus program. This paper explores the resilience of the commercial spyware market and offers ideas about how to limit the spread of invasive cyber surveillance tools. It highlights several factors driving the industry, including elevated demand for intrusion technology from government clients and private customers, as well as inconsistent political will from democratic governments to crack down on these technologies.
- Topic:
- Science and Technology, Cybersecurity, Democracy, Surveillance, Industry, Forensic Science, and Autocracy
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
14. China’s AI Regulations and How They Get Made
- Author:
- Matt Sheehan
- Publication Date:
- 07-2023
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
- Abstract:
- China is in the midst of rolling out some of the world’s earliest and most detailed regulations governing artificial intelligence (AI). These include measures governing recommendation algorithms—the most omnipresent form of AI deployed on the internet—as well as new rules for synthetically generated images and chatbots in the mold of ChatGPT. China’s emerging AI governance framework will reshape how the technology is built and deployed within China and internationally, impacting both Chinese technology exports and global AI research networks. But in the West, China’s regulations are often dismissed as irrelevant or seen purely through the lens of a geopolitical competition to write the rules for AI. Instead, these regulations deserve careful study on how they will affect China’s AI trajectory and what they can teach policymakers around the world about regulating the technology. Even if countries fundamentally disagree on the specific content of a regulation, they can still learn from each other when it comes to the underlying structures and technical feasibility of different regulatory approaches. In this series of three papers, I will attempt to reverse engineer Chinese AI governance. I break down the regulations into their component parts—the terminology, key concepts, and specific requirements—and then trace those components to their roots, revealing how Chinese academics, bureaucrats, and journalists shaped the regulations. In doing so, we have built a conceptual model of how China makes AI governance policy, one that can be used to project the future trajectory of Chinese AI governance (see figure 1). China’s three most concrete and impactful regulations on algorithms and AI are its 2021 regulation on recommendation algorithms, the 2022 rules for deep synthesis (synthetically generated content), and the 2023 draft rules on generative AI. Information control is a central goal of all three measures, but they also contain many other notable provisions. The rules for recommendation algorithms bar excessive price discrimination and protect the rights of workers subject to algorithmic scheduling. The deep synthesis regulation requires conspicuous labels be placed on synthetically generated content. And the draft generative AI regulation requires both the training data and model outputs to be “true and accurate,” a potentially insurmountable hurdle for AI chatbots to clear. All three regulations require developers to make a filing to China’s algorithm registry, a newly built government repository that gathers information on how algorithms are trained, as well as requiring them to pass a security self-assessment. Structurally, the regulations hold lessons for policymakers abroad. By rolling out a series of more targeted AI regulations, Chinese regulators are steadily building up their bureaucratic know-how and regulatory capacity. Reusable regulatory tools like the algorithm registry can act as regulatory scaffolding that can ease the construction of each successive regulation, a particularly useful step as China prepares to draft a national AI law in the years ahead. Examining the roots of these regulations also grants insight into the key intellectual and bureaucratic players shaping Chinese AI governance. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) is the clear bureaucratic leader in governance to date, but that position may grow more tenuous as the focus of regulation moves beyond the CAC’s core competency of online content controls. The Ministry of Science and Technology is another key player, one that may see its profile rise due to recent government restructuring and increased focus on regulating underlying AI research. Feeding into this bureaucratic rulemaking are several think tanks and scholars, notably the China Academy for Information Communications Technology and Tsinghua University’s Institute for AI International Governance. In the years ahead, China will continue rolling out targeted AI regulations and laying the groundwork for a capstone national AI law. Any country, company, or institution that hopes to compete against, cooperate with, or simply understand China’s AI ecosystem must examine these moves closely. The subsequent papers in this series will dig into the details of these regulations and how they came about, deepening understanding of Chinese AI governance to date and giving a preview of what is likely coming around the bend.
- Topic:
- Foreign Policy, Science and Technology, Cybersecurity, Regulation, and Artificial Intelligence
- Political Geography:
- China and Asia
15. How Saudi Arabia Bent China to Its Technoscientific Ambitions
- Author:
- Mohammed Al-Sudairi, Steven Jiawei Hai, and Kameal Alahmad
- Publication Date:
- 08-2023
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
- Abstract:
- Technoscientific cooperation between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Arab states has blossomed in recent years.1 The phrase itself has become an official “watchword” (tifa) in the context of Sino-Arab relations, suffusing nearly every official policy paper or statement on the Arab world from Beijing, including its Arab Policy Paper (2016), the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum Action Plan (2020), and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Report on Sino-Arab Cooperation in the New Era (2022).2 Yet this newly hailed “breakthrough” (tupo) has attracted both scrutiny and concern from Western officials and academics worried about their states’ influence in the Middle East and, perhaps more pertinently, the outcome of their perceived ongoing global competition with China. The anti-Huawei campaign waged across the Gulf states by American officials during the end of Donald Trump’s presidency and the beginning of Joe Biden’s was animated by questions shaped by these anxieties: Will access to, and adoption of, Chinese technologies lead to the diffusion of new distinctively “Chinese” norms and standards (such as Chinese conceptions of cyber sovereignty) or barriers to unfettered Western market access over the long run? Will these same technologies compromise national digital ecosystems and infrastructures, thereby allowing the PRC to access sensitive information surrounding Western technologies and military deployments in the region while imposing its own distinctively Chinese vision on the region? And to what extent will these processes of technoscientific borrowing embolden authoritarianism and potentially take these states out of a Western security orbit?3 Such questions are neither new nor limited to the Middle East. The PRC’s complicated entanglements in Africa over the past few decades have produced similar-sounding concerns from the West surrounding a range of issues including Chinese “debt trap diplomacy” and resource exploitation, to which scholars such as Deborah Brautigam, Ching Kwan Lee, and Lina Benabdallah have provided nuanced counternarratives.4 Inspired by these works’ emphasis on local factors that China adapts to rather than the “Chinese ways” that Beijing and its proxies ostensibly impose, and also seeking to address some of the (primarily) Western apprehensions on Sino-Arab technoscientific cooperation, this paper focuses on a single regional actor—the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a major comprehensive strategic partner (quanmian zhanlüe huoban) of the PRC.5 The paper is anchored by the contention that technoscientific development in Saudi Arabia reflects, above all, the objectives and strategies of the Saudi state in its pursuit of technoscientific self-strengthening. In approaching this topic from a local perspective, this analysis seeks to upend conventional narratives that view these transformations mainly through the prism of China’s rise, or that of the U.S.-China rivalry. There are dreamers and planners beyond those in the Beltway and Zhongnanhai, such as those in al-Yamamah Palace, and their ambitions must be taken into account in understanding the nature, scope, intensity, velocity, and specifics of their collaborations with China. The paper is divided into three sections. The first discusses the evolution of Saudi Arabia’s approach to technoscientific development. It serves to shed light on the underlying logic guiding the kingdom’s global search for technoscientific partnerships. The second focuses on Chinese-Saudi technoscientific cooperation and localization projects, providing a general overview of the history of such cooperation followed by a discussion of some of its structural trends and impediments in terms of human resources, the circulation of capital, and the role of the state versus the private sector. The third and final section dwells on some of the key takeaways and contextualizing lessons based on the previous sections’ findings.
- Topic:
- Development, International Cooperation, Science and Technology, Innovation, and Strategic Engagement
- Political Geography:
- China, Middle East, Asia, and Saudi Arabia
16. Localization and China’s Tech Success in Indonesia
- Author:
- Gatra Priyandita, Dirk Van Der Kley, and Benjamin Herscovitch
- Publication Date:
- 07-2022
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
- Abstract:
- On average, Indonesians distrust China and many Chinese firms. Yet Huawei and to a lesser extent ZTE have successfully positioned themselves as trusted cybersecurity providers to the Indonesian government and the Indonesian nation. This has been no easy feat given long-held Indonesian animosity toward China. Many Chinese companies have faced protests over concerns they were taking local jobs. Huawei and ZTE have suffered no such fate. Nor has there been a broad coalition of Indonesian voices against using Chinese technology in critical telecommunications infrastructure. In short, Indonesians care a lot more about Chinese cement plants than they do about Huawei involvement in 5G networks. Gatra Priyandita Gatra Priyandita is an analyst at the International Cyber Policy Centre at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, where he leads a project researching cyber-enabled intellectual property theft. He is a political scientist by training and specializes in the study of foreign policy and security in Southeast Asia. He holds a PhD in political science from the Australian National University. This is a vastly different conversation to those happening in rich liberal democracies. Huawei and ZTE have been able to achieve success in Indonesia, despite a sense of ambivalence among the Indonesian political and defense establishment about Chinese intentions and growing Western scrutiny over the use of Chinese technology in broadband networks. As other papers in this series have demonstrated, Huawei and ZTE needed to localize their strategies. Like elsewhere in the world, available evidence suggests that part of Huawei’s and ZTE’s value proposition is cheaper prices (compared to those of competitors) for high-quality technology. But that is only part of the story. Huawei has positioned itself as Indonesia’s cybersecurity provider of choice by offering enormous cybersecurity and other related training programs across the country for groups ranging from senior government officials to students in rural Indonesia. Much of this training is technically focused on practical vocational skills with a hope that students one day will become customers. In addition, the company offers an attractive maintenance and upkeep package. Since the mid-2000s, Chinese information and communications technology (ICT) firms have created training centers in partnership with local Indonesian telecoms companies and universities to train the next generation of Indonesian engineers and tech specialists. Government agencies are also increasingly targets of training and capacity-building programs, with Huawei claiming that 7,000 government officials have participated in its training programs. The Indonesian government, corporations, and ordinary citizens alike have welcomed Huawei and ZTE as essential partners in their efforts to build both the infrastructure and human capital necessary to prosper in the twenty-first century’s digital economy. What Huawei and ZTE offer is knowledge transfer, not technology transfer. The technology is still being built in China by Chinese firms. Huawei’s role in training relates instead to capacity building. Indonesians will install, maintain, and use the networks. China will build the hardware. There is also evidence that China has had some rhetorical success in pushing its version of cyberspace governance. Beijing’s preferred cyberspace governance language was inserted into a memorandum of understanding between Indonesia’s National Cyber and Crypto Agency and the Cybersecurity Administration of China. However, it is difficult to see how the memorandum has influenced Indonesia’s cybersecurity governance in practice. One of the concerns often leveled by rich liberal democracies is that reliance on Chinese tech will end up aligning the political interests of countries like Indonesia with those of China. Other key worries are China’s pervasive espionage and the enduring (though as yet unrealized) risk that Chinese companies with a dominant role in an ICT ecosystem could be used by Beijing to apply coercive political pressure. Despite Indonesia’s embrace of Huawei and ZTE, political leaders in Jakarta have not simply disregarded the hard security questions posed by upgrading ICT equipment, especially when foreign suppliers are involved. Indonesian officials simply rate the need for development and cybersecurity-related capacity building higher than the risk of using Chinese ICT hardware in their critical infrastructure systems. If rich liberal democracies are concerned about this trend, then they need to offer workable alternatives that place Indonesia’s enormous digital development needs at the heart of any value proposition. It is unlikely that Indonesia will stop using Chinese hardware in its infrastructure, but alternatives could prevent overreliance.
- Topic:
- Foreign Policy, Science and Technology, Cybersecurity, Telecommunications, and Localization
- Political Geography:
- China, Indonesia, and Asia
17. Understanding and Responding to Global Democratic Backsliding
- Author:
- Thomas Carothers and Benjamin Press
- Publication Date:
- 10-2022
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
- Abstract:
- Over the past two decades, democratic backsliding has become a defining trend in global politics. However, despite the extensive attention paid to the phenomenon, there is surprisingly little consensus about what is driving it. The most common explanations offered by analysts—ranging from the role of Russia and China and disruptive technologies to the rise of populism, the spread of political polarization, and democracies’ failure to deliver—fall short when tested across a wide range of cases. A more persuasive account of backsliding focuses on the central role of leader-driven antidemocratic political projects and the variety of mechanisms and motivations they entail. This paper identifies and analyzes three distinct types of backsliding efforts: grievance-fueled illiberalism, opportunistic authoritarianism, and entrenched-interest revanchism. In cases of grievance-fueled illiberalism, a political figure mobilizes a grievance, claims that the grievance is being perpetuated by the existing political system, and argues that it is necessary to dismantle democratic norms and institutions to redress the underlying wrongs. Opportunistic authoritarians, by contrast, come to power via conventional political appeals but later turn against democracy for the sake of personal political survival. In still other backsliding cases, entrenched interest groups—generally the military—that were displaced by a democratic transition use undemocratic means to reassert their claims to power. Although motivations and methods differ across backsliding efforts, a key commonality among them is their relentless focus on undermining countervailing governmental and nongovernmental institutions that are designed to keep them in check. As international democracy supporters continue to refine their strategies of responding to democratic backsliding, they must better differentiate between facilitating factors and core drivers. Such an approach will point to the need for a stronger focus on the nature of leader-driven antidemocratic projects, identifying ways to create significant disincentives for backsliding leaders, and bolstering crucial countervailing institutions. Moreover, they should deepen their differentiation of strategies to take account of the diverse motivations and methods among the three main patterns of backsliding. Only in this way will they build the needed analytic and practical capacity to meet the formidable challenge that democratic backsliding presents.
- Topic:
- Science and Technology, Democracy, Populism, and Democratic Backsliding
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
18. A CERN Model for Studying the Information Environment
- Author:
- Alicia Wanless and Jacob N. Shapiro
- Publication Date:
- 11-2022
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
- Abstract:
- After the Second World War, European science was suffering. Scientists were leaving Europe in pursuit of safety and work opportunities, among other reasons. To stem the exodus and unite the community around a vision of science for peace, in 1949, a transatlantic group of scholars proposed the creation of a world-class physics research facility in Europe.1 The grand vision was for this center to unlock the mysteries of the universe. Their white paper laid the foundation for the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), which today supports fundamental research in physics across an international community of more than 10,000 scientists from twenty-three member states and more than seventy other nations.2 Together, researchers at CERN built cutting-edge instruments to observe dozens of subatomic particles for the first time. And along the way they invented the World Wide Web, which was originally conceived as a tool to empower CERN’s distributed teams. Such large-scale collaboration is once again needed to connect scholars, policymakers, and practitioners internationally and to accelerate research, this time to unlock the mysteries of the information environment. Democracies around the world are grappling with how to safeguard democratic values against online abuse, the proliferation of illiberal and xenophobic narratives, malign interference, and a host of other challenges related to a rapidly evolving information environment. What are the conditions within the information environment that can foster democratic societies and encourage active citizen participation? Sadly, the evidence needed to guide policymaking and social action in this domain is sorely lacking. Researchers, governments, and civil society must come together to help. This paper explores how CERN can serve as a model for developing the Institute for Research on the Information Environment (IRIE).3 By connecting disciplines and providing shared engineering resources and capacity-building across the world’s democracies, IRIE will scale up applied research to enable evidence-based policymaking and implementation. Where CERN “exists to understand the mystery of nature for the benefit of humankind,” IRIE will exist to understand the mystery of the information environment for the benefit of democracies and their citizens.4 While the laws of physics change slowly, the conditions within the information environment are little understood and changing rapidly through the addition of new technology. Additionally, studying the information environment will require analysis of personal and at times sensitive data of internet users, increasing the need for international collaboration. As CERN did by inventing new collaboration tools, IRIE will leverage those same technologies to unlock the collective genius of researchers and practitioners from a variety of fields to strengthen democracy, alongside interested citizens who contribute their own data and expertise. While there are obvious differences between the field of physics and those emerging to study the information environment, aspects of CERN’s development can guide the creation of IRIE, an institution that can uniquely address the growing needs of researchers.
- Topic:
- Science and Technology, Research, Collaboration, Information, and CERN
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
19. Government Internet Shutdowns Are Changing. How Should Citizens and Democracies Respond?
- Author:
- Steven Feldstein
- Publication Date:
- 03-2022
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
- Abstract:
- Governments worldwide continue to deploy internet shutdowns and network disruptions to quell mass protests, forestall election losses, reinforce military coups, or cut off conflict areas from the outside world. Data from the past few years show that incidences of global shutdowns have remained steadily high: 196 documented incidents in 2018, 213 incidents in 2019, and 155 in 2020. The first five months of 2021 recorded fifty shutdown incidents.1 Government-instigated internet shutdowns largely took place in relation to five event types: mass demonstrations, military operations and coups, elections, communal violence and religious holidays, and school exams. As Clément Voule, the United Nations special rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, pointedly observes: “Shutdowns are lasting longer, becoming harder to detect and targeting particular social media and messaging applications and specific localities and communities.”2 Events in Russia have put a finer point on internet shutdown trends. On March 4, 2022, Roskomnadzor, the Russian internet regulator, announced that it would block Facebook and Twitter and would ban new uploads to TikTok.3 On March 14, it added Instagram to the banned list.4 Russian authorities have also restricted access to a slew of news websites, including the BBC, Deutsche Welle, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Voice of America. Roskomnadzor claimed these measures were enacted in response to new limits imposed by platforms on Russian propaganda outlets—accusing Facebook of “discrimination.”5 The Kremlin’s crackdown is an ominous signal about where the shutdown struggle is headed in authoritarian countries. Despite these bleak trends, there is a growing international consensus—at least among liberal democracies—that protecting internet access is integrally linked to freedoms of expression and association and forms a crucial part of the global democracy and human rights agenda. This paper picks up on this emerging norm and probes several key questions: What can citizens do to evade authoritarian controls and regain internet access? How can democratic governments support these efforts and push back against governments that shut down and block the internet? The short answer is that there is a multitude of responses available to democracies and civil society organizations to push back against internet blackouts and network disruptions. Democracies can exert meaningful pressure against repressive governments to ease internet blocks, and citizens are able to exercise creative options to circumvent internet controls. The paper walks through different tools available to citizens to evade internet controls. It examines where internet shutdown trends are headed and incentives for particular regimes to adopt new modes of censorship. It then presents a multifaceted strategy for democracies, civil society organizations, and technology developers and companies to counter internet shutdowns.
- Topic:
- Government, Science and Technology, Democracy, and Internet
- Political Geography:
- Russia and Global Focus
20. How Huawei’s Localization in North Africa Delivered Mixed Returns
- Author:
- Tin Hinane El Kadi
- Publication Date:
- 04-2022
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
- Abstract:
- Trade between China and North Africa has increased significantly since the early 2000s, but it has largely reproduced patterns of unequal exchange. Since they were unveiled, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Chinese government’s 2016 Arab Policy Paper have signaled the promise of a qualitative shift in China’s engagement with the region. China has committed to increase investments in high-value-added sectors and to boost cooperation in science and technology with countries across North Africa. The digital space is a notable aspect of recent China–North African partnerships. Chinese tech firms are becoming ever more important actors in North Africa through the Digital Silk Road, the digital component of the BRI. North African governments see the Digital Silk Road as an opportunity to help bridge the digital divide and bolster their own national efforts to build digital economies and create high-quality jobs for the millions of unemployed university graduates across the region. In recent years, the region has become home to notable Digital Silk Road projects such as smart cities, satellite navigation centers, data centers, and network infrastructure. Huawei’s localization strategies in Algeria and Egypt show that, far from imposing a one-size-fits-all blueprint on other countries, as Beijing is often depicted as doing in U.S. and European media and policy discussions, Chinese tech players adapt their engagement depending on local development agendas. Flexibility, customization, and services tailored to local demand have been cornerstones of Huawei’s localization strategies in North Africa. Accommodating local development priorities is central to Huawei’s success in globalizing its business ventures. The Chinese firm has responded favorably to Algeria’s and Egypt’s attempts to leverage foreign companies for conducting more value-added activities within their respective economies. Among other things, Huawei opened its first African factory in Algeria, employing Algerians to assemble products for and beyond the Algerian market. It also launched an OpenLab for conducting research and development (R&D) activities in Egypt and established partnerships with several universities in the region to train local students. However, closer scrutiny of Huawei’s localization in both Algeria and Egypt indicates that the company improved its brand image without engaging in meaningful capacity building. For all its success at winning the hearts of government officials across the region, Huawei has engaged in training, manufacturing, and R&D in a way designed to maintain the firm’s technological edge. The Chinese tech giant has managed to localize seemingly developmental activities in North Africa without contributing much to technological upgrading. North African governments should take lessons from China’s playbook of how it became a technological superpower. This means adopting policies that could maximize the benefits of Chinese and non-Chinese investments by ensuring positives spillovers and protecting potential local tech champions. Increasing economic integration across North African countries and moving beyond fragmented bilateral commercial negotiations with China are two steps that may help level the playing field with the Asian giant.
- Topic:
- Development, Science and Technology, Telecommunications, Huawei, and Digital Space
- Political Geography:
- China, Asia, Algeria, North Africa, and Egypt