West must urgently act to ensure China does not dominate important emerging technologies, said Fleming
- GCHQ director Jeremy Fleming said China was ‘bringing all elements of state power to control, influence design and dominate markets’
- ‘But designed without liberal values, they could be used to enable significant intrusions into the lives of citizens and companies,’ he said
The West must urgently act to ensure that China does not dominate the key technologies of the 21st century or the communist state could effectively grab control of the world’s global “operating system”, Britain’s top cyber spy said.
Britain’s spies believe that China could within decades dominate all of the key emerging technologies of this century, particularly artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and genetics.
In an unusually blunt speech on Friday, GCHQ director Jeremy Fleming said that the West faces a moment of reckoning unless it takes profound action to ensure technologies that define its prosperity are not controlled by competitors such as China or Russia.
Fleming said China was “bringing all elements of state power to control, influence design and dominate markets” while trying to dominate debates about global standards.
He said digital currencies held significant promise to revolutionise the finance sector but posed a potential threat to liberties if abused by illiberal states as they could enable “significant intrusions into the lives of citizens and companies”.
Russia remains the biggest immediate threat to the West but Communist China’s long-term dominance of technology poses a much bigger problem, he said.
“Russia is affecting the weather, whilst China is shaping the climate,” he said.
Sources
Express Tribune
Yahoo/News & SCMP
