Lucía Ortiz de Zárate
Pre-doctoral researcher in Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the Autonomous University of Madrid
Having reached an agreement on the regulation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is good news for all Europeans and, hopefully, a wake-up call for other countries and powers to follow suit and regulate these emerging technologies. AI is a group of technologies of a transversal nature that can be applied to a wide range of fields, from entertainment to border control, from personnel selection processes in companies to students at university. In other words, when we talk about AI we have to think from chatbots that assist us when we need information to facial recognition systems used to identify people.
The European regulation aims to create a space in which the adoption of these technologies is compatible with fundamental values and rights, as AI can generate major problems related to data privacy, transparency, accountability or even discriminatory situations. We have examples from other countries in the world, such as China, where data are massively collected to reward or punish citizens based on their good or bad behaviour. The EU aims to prevent such uses of AI through a risk-based regulation that sets out very strict requirements for the use of AI applied to high-risk areas such as border control, recruitment processes, etc.
Some risks are considered unacceptable as contrary to fundamental values and rights and will therefore be banned in the EU. This is the case of social scoring systems such as the Chinese case, the use of AI to modify people's behaviour or to exploit people's vulnerabilities (economic situation, age, etc.). The use of real-time facial recognition systems, which is highly controversial, seems to be banned with some exceptions (terrorism, kidnapping, human trafficking, etc.).
Whether the law is effective we will see over time. In principle, the regulation should be flexible enough to adapt to the new technological advances that are occurring faster and faster and, at the same time, sufficiently specific to be able to avoid situations that could be very serious and to sanction when necessary. In any case, it is good news that the EU has opted to regulate AI and place some limits on technologies that, without control, could be terribly harmful, even without us being aware of it.