Information

Academics Wong Lung Hsiang and Looi Chee Kit note that information and AI literacies are or will become essential for anyone living in the IT era. One must possess both literacies to responsibly and constructively produce and disseminate information, as well as to understand and appraise the functions and limitations of AI tools, and the challenges they pose.

As the Chinese authorities ease Covid-19 controls and infections increase, hearsays about symptoms, treatments and folk remedies are widespread. Lianhe Zaobao correspondent Chen Jing looks at why people fall for these baseless rumours and remain wary of the government’s responses.

With China's accelerated efforts to become a great space power, including opening up its space sector to private firms, Western developed countries worry that China's military-civil fusion (MCF) strategy may see technology developed in the commercial sector being used to boost China's military space power in the future. Are these fears justified? Japanese academic Masaaki Yatsuzuka looks into the issue.

Qiao Xinsheng points out that one should not have any expectations about the globalisation of the job market. In the internet economy era, even though internet platform companies facilitate capital’s global search for talent, this has not improved labour’s freedom of movement in search of better job opportunities. Cheap labour will continue to be exploited through the long arms of overseas capital. Not only that, with these companies' technology-enabled capabilities to collect massive amounts of data, national security will be a concern.

A Chinese app called Tuber barely had time to take root before it was yanked out of existence. It apparently gave Chinese netizens a way across the Great Firewall of China to foreign websites. In practice, those who jumped to try the app noted that it was not as revolutionary as touted to be, yet this could be a glimmer of things to come. With netizens becoming more discerning and information flows increasingly hard to stem anyway, Yang Danxu muses that a lighter touch may be the way to go.

Chinese academic Zhang Tiankan looks at Tesla’s recent network outage incident in September and remembers a similar one suffered by Chinese consumers in May this year — a no-response "smart" car or a "missing" one on your connected car app is no fun at all. Zhang says while technology is useful, we must be aware that over-reliance can leave us vulnerable to malfunctions or prone to disparaging those who have yet to embrace the digital age.

In the Internet Age, the great divide is not between the haves and the have-nots, but the weak-willed who succumb easily to online advertising and those who are above lowly distractions. The former will end up paying the price of a free Internet.

In this information age, it is all too easy for good quality information to be drowned out by insignificant noise. Yin Ruizhi argues that one needs to be able to recognise faux knowledge produced by fake public intellectuals. How do we do that?

Every month, anthropologist Bram Barclay discusses a book or concept and how it relates to contemporary China.