ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE COULD BE WHAT WE WANT IT TO BE

Our future and our present, overnight, have become more visibly interdependent on digital opportunities, in our relationships within the extended family, associations, the Nation, the European Union or the whole world. Wherever we live, we are more than ever dependent and conditioned to each other in responsibility for ourselves and in responsibility for the commons.

Particularly during the epidemic and lockdown our lives continue through digital communication channels. This virus COVID-19 changes our habits and the way we socialize. We live in a time when even the European Parliament, as the home of democracy, has literally had to closed open its doors and open up the possibility for its employees to work remotely.

As a European Citizens we would like that digital data as the source which are the base for Artificial Intelligence (AI) benefit all of us in our workplace and at home. EAI commonly refers to a combination of : machine learning techniques used for searching and analyzing large volumes of data.
Ethical, legal, economic and social issues as well as the public acceptance cannot be overlooked.
We need to be sure that the new technology is helping to citizens. That’s why we need to bring together all European resources, including access to data, connecting AI academia and AI related research to one platform which could help the companies to use this resources.

Prof.dr.Giovanni Sartor indicated, that the most important technological development of the last years is the convergence between AI and the Internet. Both technology develop significantly. AI moves towards autonomous robots and cars, towards image and speech recognition, towards data driven AI and machine learning. Internet has been moving from infrastructure of exchanging messages between humans into a global interconnected data structure. There is a convergence where the internet provides AI with data it needs and AI provides the internet with the ability to exploit the data.
There are many questions around ;

How many new jobs would be created and in the same time how could we find the optimal way to predict potential job losses ?
First of all we need to integrate technologies with human workers and complement workers rather than replacing them. That’s why a focus on education and focus on lifelong learning is necessary. We have also EU funding which are related to AI; to Big data, Emerging Technologies, Internet of Thinks (IoT), CyberSecurity and Societal Challenges

Where could smart systems with AI helping us by everywhere every day?

Data is quickly becoming the single most powerful economic driver.
Those who owns the data, owns the future. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter .Today those companies are the richest companies in human history.
Elon Alan Musk, the founder of Twitter, ambition are like live for ever, living on Mars, autonomic cars…
Artificial intelligence which is using machine learning processes fromto vast sets of data ( web page we visited, our genetics, past purchases, our behavior) with the goal of making predictions and ability to extract useful knowledge on the base of algorithms. It will be more and more utilize for decisions making in politics,medicine, banks, traffic… But we need to build public awareness and acceptance of this new technology. We need to integrate technologies with human workers and complement workers rather than replacing them. That’s why a focus on education and focus on lifelong learning is necessary.
Prof.dr.Giovanni Sartor indicated, that the most important technological development of the last years is the convergence between AI and the Internet. Both technology develop significantly. AI moves towards autonomous robots and cars, towards image and speech recognition, towards data driven AI and machine learning. Internet has been moving from infrastructure of exchanging messages between humans into a global interconnected data structure. There is a convergence where the internet provides AI with data it needs and AI provides the internet with the ability to exploit the data. So we have the perfect and capable infrastructure and technology, now we need to find the legal and ethical approach with which we would like to live.

We need to reinvent our mindset within the digital reality and to find out the positive effect in our daily live. AI would making live easier;
solving the health issues like cancer and rare diseases,
Better prediction in the treatment of disease
Banking and protection of money’s laundering
Helping by climate changes, predictions, monitoring,
helping by traveling ; Google maps, Trip advisers.
The robots which could help to elderly people
Negative effect would be like fake news, technological unemployment, cyberattacks and less privacy.

HOW EUROPEAN UNION PROCEED IN TERMS OF REGULATION OF AI?
Smart policies are needed to regulate intelligent machine. Digital Europe is one of the fifth priorities of EU for the next five years.
EU was build on the values of democracy, equality, freedom and the rule of law. Digital Europe is one of the fifth priorities of EU for the next five years. As digital technology becomes the centra part of every aspect of people’s live, people should be able to trust it. Europe’s current and future sustainable economic growth and social wellbeing increasingly draws on value created by data. Today most data are related to the citizens- to consumers and are stored and processed on cloud-based infrastructure. Europe should develop an AI ecosystem that brings the benefits of the technology to the whole European society; for citizens, for business and for services of public interest. We need to reinvent our mindset within the digital reality and to find out the positive effect in our daily live. This new book from the prof.David Ramiro Troitino will help by such of important reinvention process. AI would making live easier but in the same time could caused a new threats.
As Y.Noah Harari wrote down in the 21 Lessons for the 21 Century: “In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.”

We have all legislation about the Digital common market which is the base. We have also EU funding which are related to AI; to Big data, Emerging Technologies, Internet of Thinks (IoT), CyberSecurity and Societal Challenges
EU Commission prepared in February 2020 the White Papers about the rule specially ethical rule of AI, which will be the base for further regulations.
European Parliament EP adopted many resolutions in terms of AI like responsible development and use of . AI.AI, recently they adopted the White Papers with almost 200 amendments.

EU on ethics in AI

As digital technology becomes the centra part of every aspect of people’s live, people should be able to trust it. Europe’s current and future sustainable economic growth and social wellbeing increasingly draws on value created by data. Today most data are related to the citizens- to consumers and are stored and processed on cloud-based infrastructure. Europe should develop an AI ecosystem that brings the benefits of the technology to the whole European society; for citizens, for business and for services of public interest.
As Y.Noah Harari wrote down in the 21 Lessons for the 21 Century: “In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.”
Recently European Parliament discussing and voting about the ethical weight of AI regulation, especially in view of the great global competition in the field and highlights AI applications in health, environmental protection and food safety as of primary interest but also as high-risk sectors; it welcomes the risk-based approach identified by the Commission in the White Paper and expresses support for the creation of an EU-wide AI legal framework that will promote an ecosystem of excellence in legal certainty. It calls for an improvement of the acquits of transparency , traceability and human oversight. They pointed out the benefits of AI for disease prevention and control, exemplified by AI predicting the COVID-19 epidemic before the WHO.

AI commonly refers to a combination of : machine learning techniques used for searching and analyzing large volumes of data
In a first step EU Commission released the EU White Paper on Artificial Intelligence- European approach to excellence and trust ,in February 2020, spelling out preferred option for how to regulate AI
The EU nas carved out a ‘human-centric’ approach to AI that is respectful of European values and principles; robotics dealing with the conception, design, manufacture and operation of programmable machines; and algorithms and automated decision making system able to predict human and machine behavior and to make autonomous decisions. Despite the AI technologies can be beneficial from the economic and social point of view, many studies highlighted a number of ethical and legal concerns. EU Policy-makers are looking at ways to tackle the risk associated with the development of AI.
The EU human-centric approach to AI strives to ensure that human values are central to the way in which AI system are developed, deployed, used and monitored, by ensuring respect for fundamental rights, including those set out in the Treaties of the European Union. The EU seeks to remain faithful to its cultural preferences in particular those affecting privacy and data protection . The EU guidelines promote a trustworthy AI system and contains the seven key requirements which are regulatory framework for AI;

1. Users should be able to understand and interact with AI systems to a satisfactory degree. The right of end users not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing.
2. Technical and robustness safety is about ensuring cyber security. This requires testing AI system to mitigate the risk of cyber-attacks and hacking. To tackle this question, the EU fostering cooperation between the AI community and security community
3. 3.Privacy and data protection; AI stakeholders need to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation as a matter of principle. AI developers should apply design techniques such as data encryption and data anonymisation. Citizens should have full control over their own data.
4. Transparency; the data that are used in building AI system should be traceable. AI systems and related human decisions are subject to the principle of explain ability – making explanations of an algorithmic decision making system available . It should be possible for them to be understood and traced by humans.
5. Diversity, non discrimination fairness; avoiding unfair bias when AI products and services are designed.
6. Societal and environmental wellbeing; the effects of AI systems on society and democracy including regarding the electoral context should be assessed. AI system should encourage sustainability and environmental responsibility.
7. Accountability; internal and external independent audits should be put in place, also the mechanisms to ensure accountability for AI systems and their outcomes.
   The EU guidelines are not binding. The lack of regulatory was improved under President of EC Ursula von der Leyen. Several Member States expressed the needs for coordination of action at EU and national level. In a first step EC released the EU White Paper on Artificial Intelligence- A European approach to excellence and trust ,in February 2020, spelling out preferred option for how to regulate AI.
   It includes a suggestion that high risk AI technology should undergo rigorous testing.
   Recently European Parliament discussing and voting with 200 amendments about the ethical weight of AI regulation, especially in view of the great global competition in the field and highlights AI applications in health, environmental protection and food safety as of primary interest but also as high-risk sectors; it welcomes the risk-based approach identified by the Commission in the White Paper and expresses support for the creation of an EU-wide AI legal framework that will promote an ecosystem of excellence in legal certainty. It calls for an improvement of the acquits of transparency , traceability and human oversight. They pointed out the benefits of AI for disease prevention and control, exemplified by AI predicting the COVID-19 epidemic before the WHO.
   It is important to ensure rigorous implementation of the ethical rules in healthcare sector, where .human are controlcontrolling over algorithms. By the epidemic of COVID -19 , the biggest ethics challenge is contact tracing, which is important tool by preventing the spread and contamination of the virus.
   Also The the use of face recognition technology (FRT) is giving rise of growing concerns. Recent developments of EU regulators going to regulate high risk applications to bans on facial recognition technology.

HEALTH ISSUE

The COCVID-19 virus was entirely new to humankind when it burst into the world in Dec 2019. It’s meaning that scientists knew very little about how it spreads, the disease it caused and how to treat it.

The response to the recently health crisis has in many ways been mediated by data- information being used by AI algorithms to better understand the virus including tracking the virus spread.Artificial Intelligence (AI) is playing a key role in the response. But technology , like it’s human maker, is not immune to bias. AI generally designed to digest large volumes of data to support decision making- reflect the prejudices of the humans who develop it and feed it information that it uses to spit out outcomes. There is no clear consensus on what will make AI technology responsible and safe en masse. Fairness issues with AI showcase the biases in human decisions making, according to dr.Adrian Weller from Alan Turning Institute. He said, that it’s wrong to assume that not using algorithms means everything will be just fine.
Recent developments of EU regulators going to regulate high risk applications to bans on facial recognition technology.
Sharing of health data between countries and organizations will be essential in the ongoing fight against COVID-19. Sharing data has allowed scientists to exchange genetic sequences from the virus to track how it has spread, enabled doctors to learn how to spot the symptoms of the disease and giving hospitals the ability to share the best way of treating virus. Pharmaceutical companies have also been able to use the data about virus and patients immune responses to develop vaccines. It has been useful in helping to see how the virus is mutating and what determines why some people get sick and others don’t.
But a lot of health data contains sensitive details about patients, regulated by European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The European Commission established a COVID-19 Data Platform, supported by ECDC – European Agency for Disease Prevention and Control, to allow research data to be rapidly collected and widely shared and have drawn Manifesto to make COVID-19 research results accessible. One of the lessons to be learned from the pandemic is how we can use AI to prevent future health crises.

Coronavirus response measures have accelerated the transition to telework, with the proportion of European’s who work remotely shooting from 5% to 40% as a result of the pandemic. Changing nature of work and skills in the time of pandemic is coherent with the digital revolution in Europe. However, one the pandemic ends, remote working is likely continue. Many organizations may turn to AI to help with the transition to teleworking, particularly through real-time system that can monitor remote employees. EU report found, that one third of the EU labour force has very limited digital skills or none at all. The majority of jobs in the future will require at least moderate computer skills, that why the education system need to be geared to these needs.

Thee are many dark part of AI. Like Einstein has had never imagine that his invention will destroyed so many people’s lives with atomic bombs, also today’s scientist do not have the goal to developing AI for the black side or misused. They do not want to initiate platforms for fake news. They do not want to allow privacy controls.Fake News as a dark part of AI;Despite the good intentions of the scientists,
Every day we are every day surrounded sorounde with false rumors and half truths. Fake news leads to false ideas and therefore misguiding citizens and undermining our democracies. For many of us the online platforms and the social media becomes the main source of our information. The secretive algorithms are now shaping the information flow of each and everyone of us. But the question is who is taking the advantage of this approach; on the first line the stakeholders, who exploit disinformation as a tool for manipulation of public opinion. It happened during the elections in U.S.and in different EU Members. Web sites creating fake content as a way to gain influence or just to make money. It is difficult to find the solution for the complex challenge, because the possible solutions must respect freedom of
expression and media pluralism. And also because of any policy response must preserve citizens freedoms and democratic choices.

Privacy and data protection are more than ever under the dangers of the cyberattacks, under the misuse of personal data. As a citizen we are afraid of being under control all the time, being under control of Government, being under control as a consumers. But there is no way back to pre-digital epoch. That’s why we need to discuss , to learn, to building the trust among all of us. It’s not possible to regulate every peace of our live. But it is possible to develop sensitive and ethical society.

The next ten years will be Europe’s Digital Decade. EU will invest 20% of the after COVID-19 recovery plan to strengthen our digital sovereignty . The focus will be on European cloud, connectivity for all, to Quantum and supercomputing . “The future will be what we make it. And Europe will be what we want it to be. And let’s build the world we want to live in.”Ursula von der Leyen , the President of European Commission.

With knowledge , awareness and trust among the citizens, with politicians with high ethical standards, Artificial intelligence could be what we want it to be.

Zofija MAZEJ Kukovič,
Former Minister of health and Member of European Parliament
Deputy Chair of ECDC Management Board

Source: European Parliament, European Commission