Sometimes life is stranger than fiction.
Provably and easily hackable imported Chinese vacuum robots have reportedly been comporting themselves poorly in the presence of their American owners lately, broadcasting racial epithets and other such indelicacies.
Related: Chinese Communist Party Literally Names Its Domestic Surveillance Program 'Skynet'
Via ABC (emphasis added):
Robot vacuums in multiple US cities were hacked in the space of a few days, with the attacker physically controlling them and yelling obscenities through their onboard speakers…
Minnesota lawyer Daniel Swenson was watching TV when his robot started to malfunction.
"It sounded like a broken-up radio signal or something," he told the ABC. "You could hear snippets of maybe a voice."
Through the Ecovacs app, he saw that a stranger was accessing its live camera feed and remote control feature.
Dismissing it as some kind of glitch, Mr Swenson reset his password, rebooted the robot and sat back down on the couch beside his wife and 13-year-old son.
Almost straight away, it started to move again.
This time, there was no ambiguity about what was coming out of the speaker. A voice was yelling racist obscenities, loud and clear, right in front of Mr Swenson's son.
"F*** n******s," screamed the voice, over and over again.
Taking at face value that these incidents appear to be the work of rogue prankster, and putting aside that the Chinese put hackable backdoors in electronic products for obvious reasons, there is a substantive point to this story, which is that sowing racial division inside the United States is a major part of the Chinese strategy to weaken its primary geopolitical opponent.
Related: AI Bots Discuss the Darker Existential Human Emotions: 'I Like That You Have Angst'
Via German Council on Foreign Relations (emphasis added):
Over the summer [of 2020], as both the Trump and Biden campaigns ramped up efforts to win the most controversial presidential election in decades, Laura Daniels, Jessi Young and Erin Brown also got busy, posting critical comments about American politics and society on Twitter and other social media platforms. They tweeted about mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. They posted about racial injustice. And they shared their views (not good) of the personal and political scandals dogging President Donald Trump.
The three women appeared to be just like millions of other Americans who take to social media every day to express their displeasure at the state of the U.S. Yet there were anomalies. The women's messages were sometimes identical to others on Twitter and Facebook. Their handles were similar and they tended to make sweeping statements putting down America and its democratic system, rather than referencing specific events. Their use of language was off too, stilted or mixing up familiar expressions—"Black people are never slaves! Stand up your high head!" read one of Jessi's more garbled tweets. And one more thing: Occasionally, a stray Chinese-language character would slip into one of their posts or hundreds of others just like them.
That last part was especially odd—until you consider that the women weren't actually women at all but rather bots and trolls used in a systematic campaign by groups affiliated with China to sow division and unrest in the U.S. ahead of the 2020 election…
The social posts from Chinese actors did not have a clear partisan lean—for instance, they promoted messages in support of both the Black Lives Matter and pro-police Blue Lives Matter movements. The point was not to take a side but rather to boost divisiveness by amplifying competing, emotionally-charged view points.
Fortunately, as noted — or unfortunately, if you share Tampon Tim’s love for the communist state — the massive language gap between the Western European languages and those of East Asia, combined with the general social awkwardness of the Chinese anyway, these campaigns are not likely to be as effective as the CCP might hope.
