Hi @PeopleEngineer! Thank you. There is no ‘follow’ feature, but you can click on the user profile icon twice and check the ‘Activity’ tab, to see recent activity.
Are you referring to the role of AI in the dystopic system I outlined?
The AI systems we currently have are not really ‘intelligent’. They are still far from Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) - the kind that can apply things learned in one context, to an entirely different context and come to new insights (similar to how humans can learn).
As you may know, our current AI systems are applications of Machine Learning (ML), and they are exceptionally well equiped to pattern recognition in enormous amounts of data (terabytes and even petabytes of it). Thus they help humans where we lose oversight and are ideally suited surveillance applications based on the enormous amounts of personal data (data points) that we broadcast to the internet on a daily basis.
They can correlate data from every Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensor, camera’s, smartphones and any other internet connected device and analyse them in (near) real-time. The raw data remains in storage (big data, ‘data lakes’) and is lying in wait for ever more sophisticated analysis and correlation of data points (currently there are still many challenges to do this efficiently, with large error rates, but technology is improving very fast).
It should be clear that authoritarian governments (or any government, for that matter), are very interested in these applications. Where at the time of the East-German Stasi huge organizations of informants and administrators were required (and much of the suppression depended on fear), these new AI systems can do much of the work without human involvement altogether, and only the most ‘interesting’ cases are handed over for human processing.
The systems can know you better than your mother knows you, or even better than you know yourself. Your day-to-day lifestyle habits, your social netwerk online and in real life, your precise location, the way you communicate, your psycho profile and emotional state. All determined from your data points, and analysed over prolonged timespans (continuous).
Suppose you become unhappy with your government or how the state operates. You meet other unhappy people, or you influence others with your discontent. Minute changes in your behavior can be detected already. It is really hard to hide if you want to do something to improve matters (and go against the will of the regime).
So that is the surveillance part of the equation. Now, with a population of millions of people, there will always be unhappy people who start resisting the rules. How do you control them? This is another realm where AI can (and does) play an important role.
With so much of our interactions occurring online, the AI systems can determine which interactions we are allowed to have. They can influence us. This can simply mean that online you do not ‘meet’ other discontented people. You do not get to see information that the government does not want you to see. As if it does not exist.
And if you still manage to find like-minded people, and there is a Social Credit system in place, then the systems can marginalize your influence. Your credit gets lowered, and personalized punishments can be dealt to you (i.e. losing societal benefits, the right to travel, black lists, etc.) to put you back in line. Not only punishments can be dealt out, but also personalized rewards (like bribes) to reign you in.
The point is: All of this occurs without human interaction, once the systems are in place. Only if these measures are not sufficient the system will spew your name to the appropriate government body for human handling. Thus a very small amount of people can control a huge population. Hence dystopia.
Hope this addresses your interest 
