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The European Union has unveiled proposals to regulate artificial intelligence that call for strict rules and safeguards on risky applications of the emerging technology.
The report on artificial intelligence is part of the bloc’s wider digital strategy aimed at maintaining its position as the global pacesetter on technological standards.
The EU’s executive commission said it wants to develop a “framework for trustworthy artificial intelligence”.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen had ordered her top deputies to come up with a co-ordinated European approach to artificial intelligence and data strategy 100 days after she took office in December.
To boost 🇪🇺 AI, we want to attract more than €20bn/year during the next 10 years. AI is all about data. To use it at large scale, we need to pool it. We’ll create a single market for data in the🇪🇺 & want to trigger investments of €4-6bn in EU data spaces & cloud infrastructures
— Ursula von der Leyen (@vonderleyen) February 19, 2020
Clear rules are needed to address “high-risk AI systems” such as those in health, policing or transport, which should be “transparent, traceable and guarantee human oversight”, the EU said.
Authorities should be able to test and certify the data used by the algorithms that power artificial intelligence in the same way they check cosmetics, cars and toys, it said.
It is important to use unbiased data to train high-risk artificial intelligence systems so they can avoid discrimination, the commission said.
EU leaders said they also wanted to open a debate on when to allow facial recognition in remote identification systems, which are used to scan crowds to check people’s faces against those on a database.
It is considered the “most intrusive form” of the technology and is prohibited in the EU except in special cases.
