AI Legislation in Europe #
On April 21st, 2021 the European Commission published A European approach to Artificial intelligence. This follows on from the White Paper on Artificial Intelligence published in February 2020.
It includes a summary communication, an update to the Coordinated Plan on Artificial Intelligence and a Proposal for a legal framework on AI.
Key points taken from the summary communication are included below:
- Two pronged policy
- invest in AI
- ensure AI is human-centric and trustworthy
- Planned Investment
- 1 billion per year from Commission
- investments from private sector and member states to reach €20 billion over the course of the decade
- Recovery and Resilience Facility will provide €672.5 billion in loans and grants to support member states during first years of recovery. 20% or €134 billion allocated to digital transition
- Existing funding programmes include Digital Europe and Horizon Europe and the Cohesion Policy programmes
- Linked to
- European Data Strategy and proposal for the [[EU Data Governance Act]]
- fair access to data for small and medium enterprises
- Product Safety Legislation and the [[EU Machinery Directive]]
- Addresses safety risks
- human-robot collaboration
- cyber risks
- autonomous machines
- Addresses safety risks
- EU Security Union strategy
- cybersecurity strategy
- digital education action plan
- Digital Services Act
- Digital Markets Act
- European Democracy Action Plan
- European Data Strategy and proposal for the [[EU Data Governance Act]]
- Will be complemented by adapting the EU liability framework
- revised Product Liability Directive
- revised General Product Safety Directive
- New business and employment opportunities expected to outweigh potential job losses
- Higlighted applications/benefits
- Environment
- Security
- Risks
- Opacity of algorithms pose risks to safety and fundamental rights (whether covered by existing legislation or not) due to the difficulty explaining reason for a specific result
- Impact on privacy from facial recognition
- Errors that undermine privacy and non-discrimination
- EU to develop new global norms on AI legislation and international standardisation initiatives and cooperation frameworks
- Legal framework is
- intended to intervene only where necessary and have a light governance structure
- Provides technology-neutral definition of AI
- Focuses on ‘high-risk’ AI use cases including
- recruiting
- checks for creditworthiness
- judicial decision making
- high-risk AI systems need to respect a set of specifically designed guidelines
- high-quality datasets
- documentation to enhance traceability
- sharing adequate information with the user
- design and implementation of appropriate human oversight
- meet standards for robustness, safety, cybersecurity and accuracy
- high-risk AI systems must be assessed for confirmity before being placed on the market or put into service
- Ban on a limited set of uses
- distorting behavior through subliminal techniques
- causing physical or psychological harm
- Controls on remote biometric identification (e.g. facial recognition in public places)
- Minimal transparency requirements on other uses
- encourages use of regulatory sandboxes
- These relax certain regulatory requirements for participants for a limited time, to support innovation in fields such as FinTech where existing regulations are ambiguous, outdated or too burdensome to make use of breakthrough technologies