There’s a great discussion here on China’s use of AI and the creation of social credit.

Episode 77: A Conversation with Nicholas Thompson

So talk a little bit about social credit for the listener who may not be that familiar with it or only familiar with the term?

Yes. The idea of a social credit system is that not everybody in China (but this is being rolled out and it seems like it will continue be rolled out, it is)… Think about your FICO score, which is in the United States a measure of your credit worthiness and it’s very useful for determining whether you can get loan. Then imagine taking all the factors that go into your FICO score right? How many credit card accounts have you opened? Do you pay them back? Have you defaulted to black marks? And then imagine adding every other factor you could to them. So imagine adding like, do you pay your parking tickets on time? Have you gotten speeding tickets? Have you given money to charity?

And you can imagine a state setting up a value system and then grading its citizens in every one of those categories. I sometimes joke that it’s a FICO score adjusted for your political beliefs and then not only that, — and then this is the part that’s most interesting to some as far as others — is that your score gets adjusted by the people you are connected to. So, imagine that if you had a FICO score adjusted for your politics and then adjusted for the scores of all the people you’re friends with on Facebook or that you follow on Twitter, so that you then have lots of incentives to, you have all kinds of incentives to be even better.

So in China a score like this to some degree (not obviously everything but lots of data that the government can’t get) is being set up for every citizen, and will have an effect on how the person moves through society. And there are all kinds of good things that can come about from this. You can have a more efficient economy, you can have a benevolent government, good set of incentives for people to treat each other properly. There are all kinds of potential benefits, but the disadvantage of course is that you increase the capacity for state surveillance and control.