Europe eyes strict rules for artificial intelligence
politico.eu
politico.eu
>But the rules carve out an exception allowing authorities to use the tech if they're fighting serious crime
Wow, if I haven't heard this "proposal" format before in dystopian book or real-world cases...
I'd say it miss the mark completely considering the problem whatever lax definition of "AI" we use today is that the advancements and benefits seems to be concentrating mostly on big tech. For China, you can add "Big Gov" on that list. And now EU want to add another asterisk in their rule-book allowing big Gov to enter that list. Seems like a poor proposal made to target Sci-fi "Black mirror" rather than reality, and failing while at it.
If the statistical or AI system makes a serious mistake in this area, consequences are even more disastrous. Their usefulness is dubious anyway.
We do in fact have an exception in the GDPR for specific agencies involved in fighting serious crime. You may look at the specific text for that here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
If it's about AI, where is the line? Does reinforcement learning count? What about deep learning? Neural networks? 5 clever if statements?
> The proposal also wants to prohibit AI systems that cause harm to people by manipulating their behavior, opinions or decisions; exploit or target people's vulnerabilities; and for mass surveillance.
> many technologies currently in use in Europe today, such as algorithms used to scan CVs, make creditworthiness assessments, hand out social security benefits or asylum and visa applications, or help judges make decisions, would be labeled as "high risk," and would be subject to extra scrutiny.
> One of the Commission’s requirements in the draft are that data sets do not “incorporate any intentional or unintentional biases” which may lead to discrimination.
so "5 clever if statements" (which most CV parsers are, if that wasn't clear) too are subject to extra scrutiny depending on application being labeled high risk or not.
I'm not sure how to feel about this. I feel it's good intentions but marketed wrong.
Why not just say, we will evaluate critical software like we evaluate other critical engineering projects/infrastructure? Why mix in AI?
Do you mean like buildings or lawyers? Certified AI architecture now? Nobody even knows what such process would entail!
The biggest hole is that the AI or statistical systems are not explainable. When push comes to shove, their reasoning is a black hole. Any such system, whether ran by people or automatic, is instant corruption and inequity magnet.
5 if statements are explainable and subject to proper scrutiny.
Except when they are secret. I will never know why my CV got sent to /dev/null that day, was I missing the right keyword for the fourth if ? For me the 5 ifs are as much a blackbox as an advanced neural network.
I would think the intend is about technology that could hurt citizens. More like responsible use of technologies. As a tech I support this kind of initiative. Anything allows software to identify person become a slippery slop to totalitarian government (in this day and age it won't just be government, also include trans-nation corporations).
Cheap satellites and drones means a camera or antenna following you every second, whenever you want it or not. Cheap cameras and AI means you are tracked in the subway, and on the street, like in London, Beijing or Shanghai.
Your physical movements, your pace and your stance will be recorded so they could identify you by your movement alone.
Movements will be analyzed for atypicals like they do in China.
A city will be recorded from above all the time like the US military does so they could go "backwards" after something happens.
In the past living on a city was freedom from being observed all the time by your neighbors like in small villages. In the future it means the opposite because it makes economic sense to put technology in the cities when lots of people will be controlled.
This should be regulated and will be regulated because the potential for abuse is tremendous or we will live in dystopia, with freedom and autonomy eradicated.
Social scoring systems, biometric data surveillance, data aggregation for behavior predictions are actual problem with the management of our data. But citizens are not informed enough on whats is happening really fast with AI, smart cities, and always-connected devices.
Ps > Eric Schmidt, Google's former chief and chair of the U.S. National Security Commission
Fortunately we're not countries that are so money-run that nominated into Security Commission of A.I. a chief of the largest data company in the world.
> Europe's strategy won't be successful, as it is "simply not big enough" to compete.
Compete with who? Is about preserving the privacy of citizens and not let big corps steal and aggregate all your data for profit without any control
It wont be a total segregation, but it will start to look something like the Amish. A functioning way of life, cottage industries and great donuts, Don't expect any rockets to Mars though.
Energy generation could also become massively cleaner and more affordable with advances in reusable rockets, as space-based solar power generation affordable.
As for being 'parasitic', that goes both ways. Taxes are not a voluntary system, and much of the resources extracted are wasted and/or used to enrich rent-seeking insiders who are close to the government.
A once-in-every-four-year election, involving millions of poorly informed and easily manipulated voters, provides far less accountability than individuals making decisions every day on how efficiently their dollars/euros are being spent.
As for wealthy interests, whether it's billionaires, or massive blocs of highly paid unionized civil servants, where do you think the malevolent ones can do more damage: in a rules-based free market, where consumers control their own money, or in a government controlled market where controlling the consumer is only a matter of gaining political clout and dictating to private citizens how their wealth will be spent?
In a rules-based free market, it's irrelevant that Apple is worth $1.5 trillion. It can't force me to buy Apple products. Once the free-market ruleset is undermined, then Apple can, through taxing authorities and regulatory gatekeepers and the armed government agents that enforce their taxes and restrictions, force me to buy its products.
The free market ruleset protects our most basic rights, and is the most important institution for protecting the weak from the strong. That you believe otherwise is a deliberate outcome by those who want to abolish those safeguards.
As for employment standards, that's a double edged sword; making it harder to hire people also locks young people out of the job market. Where do ambitious smart young people with no familial ties go to seek their fortune? Not Italy.
If you ignore the countries that didn't rely on coal in the first place, like France, Belgium or Austria just to name a few, all of which fare better in consumption of CO2 producing energy like oil, coal and gas.
Cars are are much more of a thing in the USA than in the EU, so slower electrical vehicle rollout is completely normal. And even then, sales are exploding.
> As for employment standards, that's a double edged sword; making it harder to hire people also locks young people out of the job market. Where do ambitious smart young people with no familial ties go to seek their fortune? Not Italy
Yes, that is indeed a problem many are trying to tackle ( via reform, encouraging hiring, startups, etc.). I don't think scraping all employee protections to make it easier for young people to get a shitty job is worth it.
This is simply not true. The US industrial meat production system has no current parallel in Europe and is net negative environmentally, for health and (and is morally bankrupt to boot). We also have much tighter regulations on the environmental impact of development, greater recycling rates etc, better OSH protections, significant reductions in VOCs in consumer chemicals just to name a few examples.
The US and Europe are increasingly different — which is where this conversation started. I'm glad we're diverging from the path the US is taking in a number of ways (and sad we left the EU for that reason... we should be modelling ourselves on northern Europe rather than Singapore).
The biggest way Americans are harmed by their meat is the fact that it's so cheap that they eat a lot of it, but "we need meat to be expensive so you don't pig out" is not a justification the EU is willing to deploy. At any rate, it's a messy unpleasant business no matter how they're sliced up, and I'll feel a lot better when I'm reading hand-wringing articles about how plant-based meats are destroying the traditional landscape by getting rid of all the cows. It feels like we're on the verge of a breakthrough there: Impossible Burgers and Beyond Meat are both very, very convincing. And both firms are American, of course.
BTW recycling rates are a bit of a sham. Most of the material marked as 'recycled' ends up in China and whether it really gets recycled in the way people mean then is very questionable. A lot of it doesn't.
"we should be modelling ourselves on northern Europe rather than Singapore"
I disagree. The UK absolutely should look to America and Singapore. Europe looks increasingly like a reactionary backwater. Look at the mess over vaccines. That dysfunction is everywhere but was hard to spot before because there wasn't a good counter-example to compare to, except very small places like Switzerland which at any rate are forced to be half-in even when they vote against it.
Where's the exciting stuff happening? Where's the progress coming from? I've spent virtually all of my career working for and with Americans, even though I'm a Brit living in central Europe, because that's where the action is. It wasn't even a conscious choice: they came to me, they found me and where were the European companies doing that kind of search? Nowhere. And it showed: the times when my colleagues were mostly European were times when we all reported to bosses in the USA. The EU makes a huge deal all the time about how only it can push back against global forces and defend European "ways of life", which is a purely reactionary take on things and anyway, there is no such "European way of life". The reason they are terrified of being fragmented is because they know they don't have it in them to define the future, only club together to try and stare it down and hope the people who actually are making the future roll over in exasperation. It's a dead end strategy and no path for the next generation.
You mean the Herero? What does that have to do with auto industry? (I'm really asking, this was the first result I found)
https://sciencebusiness.net/news/data-protections-rules-harm...
>“GDPR rules have stalled or derailed at least 40 cancer studies funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH)”
>“5,000 international health projects were affected by GDPR requirements in 2019 alone”
I suspect this will similarly have significant negative unintended consequences.
Someone unable to handle consent forms should not be anywhere near medicine.
Perhaps someone should reevaluate how things are ran. Wild west ended with company towns and literal slaughter. Perhaps that is a good thing to avoid.
And company towns were generally good:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/01/in...
By the way, what about military uses? Counterintelligence? Anything goes?
Nowadays the corporations do not have this kind of control because they don't want real estate on this level. The towns were extremely vulnerable to downturn in business, and still are. (Even whole industry sector cities have problems, such as Detroit.)
Capitalism itself is based on profit, which is not shared to workers. By definition exploitative, unlike taxes, which are supposed to be redistributed back to populace as services almost in whole, if the government works correctly. (Excluding public sector salaries. Monarchies and dictatorships excluded to a point.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike
>>On June 29, 1894, Debs hosted a peaceful meeting to rally support for the strike from railroad workers at Blue Island, Illinois. Afterward, groups within the crowd became enraged and set fire to nearby buildings and derailed a locomotive.[8] Elsewhere in the western states, sympathy strikers prevented transportation of goods by walking off the job, obstructing railroad tracks, or threatening and attacking strikebreakers. This increased national attention and the demand for federal action.
This was destruction of the private company's property and trespassing to violate the shareholders' right to freedom of movement across the US. This is only justifiable if you accept the victimhood ideology, which sanctifies any worker, and grants them an unlimited right to commit any action in support of their demands. It completely rejects the principle of free association, and the free market, in favor of assigning moral superiority to individuals based on their level of wealth.
And what's wrong with strike busting? Strike busting means hiring replacement workers to cross the picket line. They hired the Pinkertons to PROTECT the workers from the violent picketers, who would regularly assault, and sometimes murder, strikebreakers.
>>Capitalism itself is based on profit, which is not shared to workers. By definition exploitative
Profit is the investor's compensation for their investment. The investors owes the worker what they commit to paying them in their employment contract - nothing more. It's not exploitation when a worker freely agrees to work for a person, and that person profits from the enterprise that they hired them to work in.
You're claiming that you can take a job based on employment terms that were disclosed to you, and then because the employer didn't share any profit that they never promised to share in the employment agreement, cry victim, and demand their private property. This is just a narrative used by cheats to rob people of property that they are in no way entitled to.
The workers get paid wages, as promised. A worker is able to save their wages after expenses, and then start their own company, and earn profit on their capital. The incentive to invest capital, into new machinery, leads to productivity growth, which leads to wage growth. That is the process that made the US the most productive country in the world by 1890, with people from Europe migrating en masse to try to enjoy the much higher hourly wages it offers.
In the US, the basic approach is to talk about all the great stuff that your company is doing. In Europe, many suppliers are happy to white-label, if you pay for it.
So when you read from an international company bragging about "their" new products without mentioning employees, chances are that they just licensed it from an outside contractor. There's lots of small high-tech contracting firms all over Europe. It's just that they don't want the (potentially negative) attention that comes with being famous.
Otherwise we go the same route like with terrorism (every muslim with a knife running around is a terrorist-attack, but if not muslin "just" a psychologically unstable person)
The rules don't really make much sense either:
> Social scoring systems, such as those launched in China that track the trustworthiness of people and businesses, are classified as "contravening the Union values" and are going to be banned.
Does this mean stuff like Yelp reviews will be banned now? Or is that not "AI" enough to count?
Between this and the horrendous anti-GM laws, Europe will struggle to compete in the future. But I guess it'll create jobs for a whole new load of bureaucrats.
> Europe will struggle to compete in the future
I'd say it already does, but not because it addresses valid issues through regulation or introduces excess regulation for invalid use cases.
One reason it does is regulatory capture, stifling competition to already established companies. It shares this aspect with the US.
Another is a cultural difference with the US, Japan or China in terms of general ambition/entrepreneurship. The European dream for most seems to be "get big enough so I can cash out", not "let's take over the world".
Yet another is that Europe, while being unified in many respects, still is a loose federation of a bunch of different cultures and languages, making it more work to appeal to and serve everyone in the internal single market.