Artificial Intelligence Now Allowing Moscow to Increase Repression while Cutting Costs of Doing So, Russian Analyst Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 11 – At the end of July, Aleksandr Bastrykin, head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, celebrated the fact that his agency had been able to integrate artificial intelligence and other IT technologies to improve its monitoring of society by processing data more quickly and cheaply than had ever been possible before.

            Aleksandr Mikhailov, a Russian analyst writing for The Insider, says that this is just one more indication that Russia, like other authoritarian states such as China and North Korea, is using AI to increase repression while at the same time cutting the costs of doing so (theins.ru/obshestvo/295475).

            In a 6,000-word article, Mikhailov describes both what these other states have been doing and how Moscow has copied them in order to make Putin’s authoritarianism not only more comprehensive than any before him but also to do so in ways that don’t require the same commitment of money and time to achieve that end.

            “Traditional methods of authoritarianism—censorship, espionage, propaganda, and forceful suppression—all required significant human and financial resources,” he writes. But “AI has changed the state of affairs” allowing authoritarian states to rapidly increase their repressive control but at far less cost.

            Mikhailov concludes with a sobering warning: “AI has exacerbated the historical confrontation between freedom and tyranny.” As a result, the democratic world no longer has the right to slow down: the algorithms of authoritarian regimes” “are already making decisions to suppress freedoms faster than democratic institutions have time to react.”