🔮 Quantum computing; face recognition & surveillance; firms, ethics & policy; the great restructuring; helium, populism & positive people ++ #174

Dept of near future

📸  “With millions of cameras and billions of lines of code, China is building a high-tech authoritarian future,” argues Paul Mozur. Fascinating detail of the scale of China’s watch list (20-30m people), how it is built by private firms and how it might be used by the state to manage increasing social disruption. (See also: profile of Megvii, the second-largest face recognition company in China. Of course, consumer face recognition isn’t quite where it should be. The iPhone struggles to recognise many morning faces, including that of your humble curator. And also, Facebook’s Densepose turns 2-d photos of people intro 3-d models, which in turn could form a part of novel ‘surveillance architectures’ allowing authorities to monitor large numbers of people at once.)

⚖️ McKinsey, facing an employee rebellion, has dropped a contract to help America’s ICE department. Google has similarly faced employee concerns over military contracts, and Microsoft has publicly stated they…