On Thursday 7 June 2018, Catelijne Muller, the chairperson of the permanent study group at the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) on artificial intelligence (AI) called on Europeans to get to grips with this subject.
Muller was speaking ahead of the summit for a European AI strategy, which will be organised by the EESC on 18 June this year.
According to Muller, Europeans should not be content to sit back and cross their arms in face of competition from the two current leaders in AI, the US, which is “focused on investment” and China, which has “a rather particular concept of private life”. Muller, from the Netherlands, was keen to point out that “We are more than 500 million citizens at the heart of a single market: our decisions count!”. She believes delays in the AI investment field can indeed be overcome.
The EESC representative also believes the EU should demonstrate leadership when it comes to regulating new technological tools by drawing on its values and fundamental freedoms that it guarantees. In this regard, she referred to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as an example of a binding text with a “global scope”.
Muller, a former lawyer, alluded to two legal concepts that she would like to include in the texts.
The degree of risk would therefore confer decision-making on humans or machines. In the event of a high level of risk, the decision should be taken by human beings, with the possible assistance of a machine.
On the other hand, the machine would be able to make a decision but not without a human being able to explain its “reasons”, which demands that a human being is “in command”, the second concept referred to by the chairperson of the EESC study group.
Ultimately, she regards the idea of criminal liability for machines as being absurd. The Dutch national indicated that “there will always be a natural person to pursue”. Muller published a synthesis of the new challenges relating to the arrival of artificial intelligence on 1 June 2017. This working paper served as a basis for the strategy outlined by the Commission, in a communication on 25 April 2018 (see EUROPE 12009).
The EESC representative was delighted that “the suggestions I made have been taken almost 100% into account by the Commission”. The Commission is expected to publish guidelines on the ethical implications of AI at the beginning of 2019. (Mathieu Solal, trainee)