RE: What could possibly go wrong?
Well, for one China is ALSO developing a computerized “Social Credit” System. This is a a national reputation system for the Chinese government. It is intended to standardize the assessment of citizens’ and businesses’ economic and social reputation, or ‘Social Credit’.
The system will be one unified system and there will be a single system-wide social credit score for each citizen and business. The system is considered a form of mass surveillance which uses facial recognition system and big data analysis technology. In 2019, it is estimated that 200 million monitoring CCTV cameras of the “Skynet” network have been put to use in mainland China, with eight Chinese cities ranked among the world’s top ten most monitored cites, while the number of surveillance cameras is expected to reach 626 million by 2020 when the Social Credit System becomes fully effective.
As of November 2019, in addition to dishonest and fraudulent financial behavior, other behavior that some cities have officially listed as negative factors of credit ratings includes playing loud music or eating in rapid transits, violating traffic rules such as jaywalking and red-light violations, failure to appear at a doctor or dentist’s appointment, or missing a job interview, restaurant reservation, or hotel reservation without making notification to cancel, failing to correctly sort personal waste, fraudulently using other people’s public transportation ID cards, etc; on the other hand, behavior listed as positive factors of credit ratings includes donating blood, donating to charity, volunteering for community services, and so on.
Though some critics question that if donation and volunteering are done with the fear of being on a blacklist as their primary motivation, then they are not altruistic.
Once you fall below a certain social credit score you are on a blacklist, you are screwed. You won’t be able to travel, enroll in schools, shop at certain places, rent or buy property, etc.
Now, imagine a cashless society where every single payment is monitored by supercomputers -— once they tie this cashless system to the social credit system, they can TURN OFF you ability to even buy anything.
BTW, when surveyed about the social credit system, MOST Chinese say they like it. The most common reason is this — it instills discipline on everyone and makes for an ORDERLY society.
It’s pretty much “The Mark of the Beast”
This is exactly the concern. And my guess is that there is absolutely no turning back. This will go global.