I fully expect this to keep getting advanced further. There has been no protest whatsoever within China and even many people of Chinese origin living in US with US citizenship seem to think this is necessary and good for the people. I have been told that "outsiders" won't "understand" this. The bottom line is that if people are not rebelling against current measures of social credit, government only has incentive to keep going.
Sooner or later government would require things like TV sets with front camera. So when a person watches TV, camera watches that person. There have been huge progress made in emotional inference which can allow government to measure emotional responses to what person is viewing. Imagine there is a news of rebellian getting crushed and if you are consistently showing supportive emotions, you can get black listed for further investigation. Cities can get microphones at restaurants and other places to analyse what conversations are happening and find hot spots where "trouble makers" hang out. Previously we had only vast sensor networks. Now we can turn each sensor in to autonomous spy that works loyally without salaries and demands nothing but cheap electricity. Computers allows for scale when humans are being replaced. If you want million spies scattered all around, its possible fairly cheaply now. I would also expect lots of other countries to adopt variant of these tech, typically under the notion of improving safety and security for general public.
Sooner or later government would require things like TV sets with front camera. So when a person watches TV, camera watches that person. There have been huge progress made in emotional inference which can allow government to measure emotional responses to what person is viewing. Imagine there is a news of rebellian getting crushed and if you are consistently showing supportive emotions, you can get black listed for further investigation. Cities can get microphones at restaurants and other places to analyse what conversations are happening and find hot spots where "trouble makers" hang out. Previously we had only vast sensor networks. Now we can turn each sensor in to autonomous spy that works loyally without salaries and demands nothing but cheap electricity. Computers allows for scale when humans are being replaced. If you want million spies scattered all around, its possible fairly cheaply now. I would also expect lots of other countries to adopt variant of these tech, typically under the notion of improving safety and security for general public.