Big Tech à l'assaut des villes « sans contact »

[felix]

Très bon article de Naomi Klein dans The Intercept, où elle montre comment Eric Schmidt, ancien CEO de Google, mène la fronde pour la conquête des Smart Cities, avec la Chine en toile de fond :

In a New York Times op-ed headlined “I used to Run Google. Silicon Valley Could Lose to China,” Schmidt called for “unprecedented partnerships between government and industry” and, once again, sounding the yellow peril alarm:

A.I. will open new frontiers in everything from biotechnology to banking, and it is also a Defense Department priority. … If current trends continue, China’s overall investments in research and development are expected to surpass those of the United States within 10 years, around the same time its economy is projected to become larger than ours.
Unless these trends change, in the 2030s we will be competing with a country that has a bigger economy, more research and development investments, better research, wider deployment of new technologies and stronger computing infrastructure. … Ultimately, the Chinese are competing to become the world’s leading innovators, and the United States is not playing to win.

The only solution, for Schmidt, was a gusher of public money. Praising the White House for requesting a doubling of research funding in AI and quantum information science, he wrote: “We should plan to double funding in those fields again as we build institutional capacity in labs and research centers. … At the same time, Congress should meet the president’s request for the highest level of defense R & D funding in over 70 years, and the Defense Department should capitalize on that resource surge to build breakthrough capabilities in A.I., quantum, hypersonics and other priority technology areas.”
https://theintercept.com/2020/05/08/andrew-cuomo-eric-schmidt-coronavirus-tech-shock-doctrine/