The Spanish Presidency of the European Union (EU), which has made digital betting one of its priorities, will try to reach an agreement between the Member States on the first rules for artificial intelligence.
After the Council defined last December the mandate that artificial intelligence (AI) systems be safe and respect fundamental rights, the European Parliament gave the green light a week ago to its position to ban biometric surveillance and impose transparency in systems such as ChatGPT, for which reason negotiations began between the co-legislators in the middle of this month.
The ambition of the European Commission, which presented the proposal for the EU to have the first AI rules that will also be a pioneer in the world, is for there to be an agreement between countries and MEPs by the end of this year and already during the Spanish presidency of the Council.
And it is precisely this European leadership, in the area of technology, that Madrid defends, which has made it one of the priorities for reindustrializing the EU and ensuring its open strategic autonomy.
“The international opening of the last seven decades has been mostly beneficial for the EU and allowed it to reach levels of economic growth and social welfare that would have been unattainable under protectionism”, but this “also facilitated the relocation of industries in strategic sectors, making the Union excessively dependent on third countries in areas such as energy, health, digital technologies and food”, points out the Spanish Presidency of the Council.
For this reason, for Spain, “the geopolitical, technological and environmental changes that are currently taking place are an opportunity to reverse this trend and attract new companies and jobs to European soil and reduce external vulnerabilities”.
To finance the digital and ecological transition, Madrid also lists as priorities the “adequate review of the 2021-2027 Multiannual Financial Framework and the adequate reform of budgetary rules.”
In 2021, the European Commission presented a proposal to regulate AI systems, the first legislation at the EU level and which aims to safeguard the fundamental values and rights of the EU and the safety of users, forcing the systems considered high risk to meet mandatory requirements. related to its reliability.
This will therefore be the first regulation aimed at AI, despite the fact that the creators and developers of this technology are already subject to European legislation on fundamental rights, consumer protection and standards on product and safety safety. responsibility.
AI has been increasingly used in areas such as entertainment (content personalization), ‘online’ commerce (predicting consumer tastes), household appliances (intelligent programming) and electronic equipment (use of virtual assistants such as Siri or Alexa, among others) .
For this reason, the European Commission hopes that, in the second half of this year, there will be an agreement in the EU on the first law on AI.
“We hope to have the first three-way dialogue [discussão entre colegisladores] on the AI Law in Europe before the summer, which would mean that, if we work hard for it, we can have a result by the end of the year”, said the executive vice-president of the institution responsible for A Europe Prepared for the Digital Age and for the Competition, Margrethe Vestager, in an interview with Lusa and other European media, published at the end of May.
Source: TSF
