jimlongton

> it’s worth noting what they’ve accomplished in getting to a place where they can afford to worry about that as one of their primary concerns

It's probably also worth noting the long history of military dictatorships, murderous suppression of worker rights, massive ongoing corruption (including a literal cult controlling the government until 2016) and the highest suicide rate in the world. Reducing the story to just economies is truly narrow minded.

I would imagine integrating North Koreans into the South would be far more difficult than the reunification of Germany. The technological and health gap alone is huge and even their language has started to drift apart.

Are there major micro/restaurant payment apps in China other than WeChat? I imagine it's difficult to compete with an app that's preinstalled on every phone, integrated with every bank and used by every restaurant and street vendor. And that's ignoring the social network effect of the 900+ million daily users.

The history of the island is pretty much a condemnation of the modern the world - massive environment devastation, money laundering hub and finally a concentration camp for refugees.

It feels like we are finally at a tipping point of mass surveillance. The explosion in the prevalence of high quality street/traffic cameras, door bell cameras (that Amazon gives the police access to) and the growth of self driving cars (surveillance machines on wheels) are the final nails in the coffin of privacy which has been slowly dying since the start of the century.

It's drug dealers now. It's not difficult to see states using this to target women who travel for abortions, people traveling to political events etc.

No mention in the article of false positives. I wonder how many people they stopped and searched to get a result. I also wonder if the areas the suspect was visiting also overlap with poor or minority neighborhoods and what that means for those targetted.

The people who could instruct such AI and evaluate its outputs would be domain experts. Without them how would you even start to approach those problems?

Science was once the domain of Catholic monks and wealthy gentry because they were the few literate people with access to books. Monoculture is not a sign of merit.

> The technological center of world continues to be a hundred square miles in Northern California

If your definition excludes the likes of the entire semiconductor industry for example.

> The alternative is real human drivers who make all kinds of mistakes every day.

From a European perspective I would say that in a city the real alternative is a functioning public transport system. Trams, light rail etc are infinitely safer and far cheaper than any form of car based system.