[ad_1]
northwest of the Forbidden City in Beijing, next to the Third Ring, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has a laboratory campus. At its center is an elegant silver-blue building surrounded by camera pillars: the Institute for Automation, whose researchers study the fundamental mysteries of artificial intelligence. Practical results, such as iris recognition or cloud-based speech synthesis, are passed on to Chinese tech giants, artificial intelligence startups, and, in some cases, the People’s Liberation Army.
On a rainy morning in the summer of 2019, I see the Chinese scientific elite arrive at the institute in basketball shorts or yoga pants and with airpods in their ears. In one pocket I have a prepaid cell phone and in my backpack an empty laptop of data, precautions that are standard for Western journalists in China. When you visit China on sensitive matters, you run the risk of being exposed to cyberattacks and malware. In 2019, Belgian officials discovered on a business trip to Beijing that their mobile data was being read by a temporary antenna outside their hotel.
