Imagine living in a city where access to services depends solely on your reputation for trustworthiness, established by a video surveillance system that records everything you do. Does this strike you as a dystopian horror scenario out of Black Mirror? In China, it’s already reality. They call it the “social credit system.”

At the start of the corona virus pandemic, the Western world regarded China “as a science fiction movie that’s not about us.” An attitude a lot of people have when it comes to talk about smart cities, 5G, AI, robotics, facial recognition, and the social credit system. Nevertheless, that science fiction movie is beginning to look more and more like a documentary, in which a future that seemed light years away has become so near it is spilling over into the present. Having received a huge assist from Covid-19, a great accelerator of processes already in progress, that future is already the present in China.

Simone Pieranni tells us about this reality in Red Mirror: Our Future is Being Written in China. The book illustrates, in five chapters, the pillars holding up the new Chinese society, which is already exercising a profound influence on the West. Pieranni’s journey starts in China’s new Silicon Valley and proceeds through the city of the future, automation, and life on points, before finishing up with quantum information science. His account describes the various aspects of present reality and the unknowns of the future, but also includes influences from the past, in an itinerary made all the more indispensable by the first global health emergency in the era of Chinese artificial intelligence, examined in the last part of the book.