The European Commission has published two new documents looking at the future of Artificial Intelligence and data in the European Union. The White Paper on Artificial Intelligence (AI) aims to support its development and uptake in the EU, as well as ensuring that European values are respected. It identifies key opportunities and challenges, analyses regulatory options and puts forward proposals and policy actions related to ethics, transparency, safety and liability etc. Key proposals within the paper include:
-
Development of rules for high-risk AI systems for healthcare, transport etc., requiring systems to be “transparent, traceable and guarantee human oversight.”
-
A requirement for unbiased data to be used to train high-risk systems so that they “perform properly, and to ensure respect of fundamental rights, in particular non-discrimination.”
-
Establishment of consumer protection rules so authorities can “test and certify” data used by algorithms (as exists for other products).
-
Proposals for the creation of an EU governance structure to ensure compliance with the rules and avoid fragmentation across Europe.
The purpose of the Data Strategy is to explore how to make the most of non-personal data as an expanding and re-usable asset in the digital economy, building on the non-personal data regulation. Key topics within the strategy include:
-
A regulatory framework incentivicing data sharing, including issues of governance, access and data (between businesses, between businesses and government, and within administrations)
-
Working towards making public sector data more widely available by opening up “high-value datasets” to enable their reuse to foster innovation
-
Support for cloud infrastructure platforms and systems to support data reuse goals – with the Commission looking to contribute to projects on European data spaces
-
Sector-specific actions to build European data spaces that focus on specific areas e.g. healthcare, transport, etc.
You can read the White Paper on AI here: https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/commission-white-paper-artificial-intelligence-feb2020_en.pdf
You can read the Data Strategy here: https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/communication-european-strategy-data-19feb2020_en.pdf