China Electronics Technology Group, which is one of their state run defense contractors, is developing the software, and they’re basically going to assemble and analyze data on ordinary citizens. It’s everything from what they’re buying, what their employment is, where they go on holiday, things like that, to try to feed this predictive analytics data base. Secondly, at the beginning of the year there were some anti-terror laws in China that allowed the government … They went into effect at the beginning of the year and they allowed the government to access a whole slew of new types of data. Everything from bank accounts to even surveillance cameras. The name of their surveillance camera unit is unironically named Skynet for some reason. Thanks very much for that. Additionally you got your major Chinese tech companies which more or less comply with government requests for data, everything from their major search engine Baidu to their social messaging apps to their e-commerce sites. All of them supply information.

Then lastly the Chinese government revealed last year that it was building a nationwide database that would rank citizens and score them on their trustworthiness. Boy, I hope I get a good … Well, we all, if we were being ranked on trustworthiness, would want to get an A grade. Wouldn’t we? If the government was ranking us. All this is very creepy and it’s perhaps easier to access from this news item which is focused on China, of course, but we have similar surveillance state creepiness happening in the US. Pick your poison, Dirk. Where would you like to start?

There are notions that I think are going to appear increasingly quaint as we know more and more about the human animal. I did a lot of research into violent crime a few years ago. It’s something that I find troubling and I’ve put some time into some problem solving in those areas, but the number one predictor of a person who will commit a violent crime is their gender. There’s a specific characteristic, I believe it’s called major violent crimes. Ninety-something percent of the people who commit major violent crimes are men. Now, we could easily armchair theorize at what the reason is for that. One candidate would be high testosterone, for example. However, what’s going to happen is in the next decade people will have a much better idea. Science will tease out a much better idea of what is this strange brew that results in people killing, raping, doing horrible things. The fact is that …

I’m going to focus on rape and sexual crime. Those are epidemic. If you look at the statistics, I believe it’s one out of four women who attend a higher education institution are going to be either the victim of sexual violence, or the victim of attempted sexual violence. One in four. Now, that’s a stat that just kind of hovers in the background, but to me that’s an epidemic. With someone with a young daughter and the idea that flip two coins and get tails twice and she’s going to be vulnerable to that, that’s not acceptable. We are as a society finding it increasingly unacceptable to perpetrate horrible things on the disadvantaged. By disadvantaged I mean the non-white males, basically. We are becoming increasingly vigilant in protecting women, racial minorities, the disables, however you want to look at that.

I think we’re heading for this sort of tipping point, if you will, where we are going to have so much knowledge around human motivation and behavior, scientifically, not armchair theory, that comes together with our finally saying, “You know what? It is not acceptable for one in four women to have to deal with an attempted sexual violence.” These things are going to come together, and I think it’s going to result in at least the consideration, at the highest levels, and potentially in public forums, of prediction and control, and controlling people from doing those things that once upon a time were tolerated. Now they’re not tolerated, but they’re still not being forcefully addressed. I think we’ll forcefully address them, and I think something akin to pre-crime may be part of that.

To tie this back to our discussion of the new Chinese software endeavor that we started with, I think that they’re going to be testing this software tool out specifically in territories where ethnic minorities are opposed to Chinese rule. Whether it is in Xinjiang or Tibet. Right? There is the opposite example, you know, the counter example, to your one of women in college. Here is a minority in Tibet, say that is resisting Chinese rule. Under the authoritarian regime, that’s seen as terrorism. Right? You have a minority where the so-called pre-crime software will be used to identify whether people are going to commit terrorists acts. Who knows what arrests them. It’s unclear what the output will be. I think it’s a double edge sword and I appreciate what you laid out so far, but I think that it’s a multi-faceted sort of aspect there. I don’t know what your reaction is.

I mean, they’re people who we know. They’re people who seem like normal people, but in different contexts and different ways and for different reasons, they manifest horribly malignant and destructive behavior on other individuals again, and again, and again, and again, and again. I do believe that there are aspects, particularly in male violence, in sort of traditional, aggressive male things, that are going to reach the point that they are no longer considered socially acceptable, and that we will legislate. I guess it would probably go through a legislative process, but I think we’ll essentially legislate them, maybe not out of existence, but try and legislate around them to control how part of our species behaves. Whether that’s pre-crime, whether it’s hormone control, whether it’s something even more, if you could believe it, if it’s even more seemingly dystopic in nature, I think those things are going to happen.

The fact is, if you go above humanity and you look at it in some objective way and you say, “You know, for one of these two genders, this super high percentage is being abused by the other one in ways that can fundamentally shatter their sense of self and the rest of their lives,” that ain’t acceptable. It’s not acceptable. Up to now we haven’t been able to see it. We haven’t been able to understand it. We haven’t been able to control it, but science is moving so fast that we’re going to understand the human animal very well. We’re going to grok what it is that results in that stuff happening, the combination of physiology, psychology, sociology, the whole nine yards. We’re going to be able to control it. That control is going to look invasive and intrusive and like something out of a science fiction movie, but is it better to put those controls on to protect the half of the people who are being imposed upon and violated? To me it’s a no brainer. It’s just a question of what does that look like when the time comes.

I’m not talking about something that is universal and heavy handed. I’m talking about just being smart about it. Is it okay that all these women are being assaulted? I say absolutely not. That’s the starting point when you say, “What can we do? What’s the gap? How can we close this gap and protect people? What does that look like?” Right now you and I are still pretty ignorant about what is this alchemy that comes together that leads to young men, and it’s disproportionately young men, raping and beating and killing and whatever the different things are, other people? That’s going to be figured out at some point in a very sophisticated way. Once we have that data, what do we do with it? I think we would be irresponsible and primitive not to do something with it.

I really am troubled by how women are treated in the culture in a holistic way, but particularly when it comes to sexual violence. It has such a big impact on their lives. I mean, there’s women who the rest of their lives, for some women, can’t have a healthy sexual relationship, can’t trust other people. This is freaking devastating and we’re just going to let it happen despite having knowledge about these are the people who are likely to do it? These are the things, the factors, that are potentially going to lead them to do it? I mean, look, I’m a man. I’ve never committed an act of sexual violence. I’ve never been disposed to commit an act of sexual violence. I have been in situations where I’m so sexually charged up that I don’t have a lot of control over how I behave. Is it possible in different contexts that I may have found myself in a situation that was in reality or perceived by the other person as sexual violence? I would say yes, it’s possible, despite the fact I’ve never done it and never had a compulsion to do it.

I’ve seen my body and my degree of self-control over myself in such ways that I can see the bridge there. I don’t want that. I don’t want to be put in that position. I don’t want these chemicals that are firing in my body to result in me really hurting somebody in ways that are horribly detrimental to them and are possibly going to impact the rest of my life in negative ways as well. For me, I would proactively say if you can tell me what are the things that could get me over the red line, and how can I be brought within myself so that I don’t go over that red line, I would sign up in a second. I want to be part of a harmonious whole with other people where we’re all being actualized and being able to be our full and best selves. I believe that the things that lead all of these men to commit these horrible acts are things that are chemical, are things that are happening that they don’t have control over in the way traditionally people say, “Oh, just control it.” I think it’s different than that, and I think we really need to look at it and think about it.