Was reading an article, “Botox and Driverless Cars to Spearhead China Growth,” and thinking the obvious, that despite a disdain for democracy, China has become Western in so many ways, especially technological ones. Of course, our new tools also threaten to make the West resemble China’s autocracy, even if it’s more corporatocracy than governmental. Smartphones are the first step, but driverless cars and the Internet of Things will move us so far into the machine, make it so easy for every step–even thought–to be tracked, that it will be impossible to withdraw. These advances will do great things, but there will be costs.

The opening of G. Clay Whittaker’s Daily Beast piece about China’s Minority Report mission:

China has a new strategy in fighting crime, ripped from science fiction and hastily pasted at the top of the list of paranoia-inducing concepts.

It’s called pre-crime. It goes further than sting operations, counterterrorism, or any other government action to preempt criminal activity ever before.

Like the 2002 film Minority Report, China wants to fight crimes before they happen. They want to know they’ll happen before they’re planned—before the criminal even knows he’s going to be part of them. Bloomberg Business reported that the Communist Party “has directed one of the country’s largest state-run defense contractors, China Electronics Technology Group, to develop software to collate data on jobs, hobbies, consumption habits, and other behavior of ordinary citizens to predict terrorist acts before they occur.”

The Chinese government wants to know about everything: every text a person sends, every extra stop they make on the way home. It’s designed for dissidents, but it means that they’ll know every time a smoker buys a pack of cigarettes, how much gas a car owner uses, what time the new mom goes to bed, and what’s in the bachelor’s refrigerator.

It’s a scary thought, especially when you consider that the main target of Chinese pre-crime efforts wouldn’t be “terrorists,” murderers, rapists, or child molesters, but rather dissidents of every shape and size.•