The president of the Institute of Systems and Computer Engineering (INESC), in statements to Lusa on Tuesday, believed that the European law on artificial intelligence (AI) is “relatively weak” in terms of competitiveness and defended the strengthening of this component .
Arlindo de Oliveira spoke to Lusa on the sidelines of the conference “Artificial intelligence on the right side of business”, organized by Vodafone and which took place on Tuesday at the Museu do Oriente in Lisbon.
When asked about the European law (AI Act), the responsible person pointed out that it is “relatively weak in terms of the competitiveness component”, with the focus “much on the security component of application risk levels”.
“I think it was important to strengthen the component of creating a competitive environment in Europe, where European companies could then compete on equal opportunities with North American and Chinese companies,” he argued.
Otherwise, Europe will continue to lose ground to the US and China in AI.
On July 14, the European Parliament gave the ‘green light’ to the European Union’s (EU) first rules for AI.
“The rules aim to promote the adoption of human-centric and trustworthy AI and protect health, safety, fundamental rights and democracy from its harmful effects,” the European Assembly said at the time.frog.
In concrete terms, this position now adopted by Members of the European Parliament stipulates that the new rules provide for a total ban on AI for biometric surveillance, emotion recognition and preventive policing, and that systems generating this technology, such as ChatGPT, transparently indicate that the content is generated by AI and even though the programs used to influence voters in elections are considered a high risk.
In April 2021, the European Commission presented a proposal to regulate AI systems, the first legislation at EU level aimed at protecting the EU’s fundamental values and rights and the safety of users, through systems that are considered high-risk are considered to be obliged to comply with mandatory requirements regarding their reliability.
In his speech at the conference organized by Vodafone, Arlindo de Oliveira addressed one of the problems associated with analytics (data analysis), namely the creation of information bubbles.
These information bubbles “have a certain risk because people see content that is different through social networks, through the media, they tend to see different realities and this makes dialogue difficult and greatly radicalizes positions,” he later explained in statements to Lusa, the expert.
I.e, “We see more and more problems in the political debate, more and more problems for people to take a different position” and “these bubbles pose a challenge to the future of societies,” said Arlindo de Oliveira.
The INESC chairman cited the US and Brazil as examples, where these information bubbles can be seen in a “very clear way”, but “in some ways also in Europe”.
When asked how to solve this problem, he pointed out that “there are both legislative and state approaches.”
For example, he said: “We can enforce that the content is not so personalized. In fact, there are laws that can be discussed about this.”
In addition, “people can try to better inform themselves, get a more balanced view of the issues and not always go to the same channels and the same social networks,” he added.
Source: DN
