Artificial Intelligence made in Europe
"In the European Union we consider AI as a topic of strategic importance for our future. We are well aware of the fact that those who will be leading the AI revolution and set the framework for data use will have a decisive edge in terms of autonomy and decision-making", said the EU Ambassador Walter Stevens.
https://twitter.com/EU_UNGeneva/status/1101088451624165376
Artificial Intelligence is one of the transformative forces of our times and is becoming a highly important topic for policy agendas of the governments and international organizations. This is why diplomats need to invest in understanding of technology and its policy implications simply to remain relevant as representatives of governments and citizens.
AI is also high on the agenda of Geneva-based organizations: ITU's Artificial Intelligence Summit, WIPO's last report on Technology Trends or the work on Lethal Autonomous Weapons within the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons are some examples of the cross-cutting character of AI for international diplomacy.
Our guest speakers Andrea Glorioso, a Senior Policy officer in the European Commission's Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CONNECT) and Dr. Katharina Höne, Senior Researcher and Lecturer at DiploFoundation discussed the EU's strategy on Artificial Intelligence in a broader international context.
The European Union aims to become a global leader in cutting-edge, secure and ethical AI. With this objective in mind, the European Commission and Member States have undertaken a number of actions, including through the High Level Group of Experts on Artificial Intelligence which has been mandated to propose ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI. This work is about to be concluded in March 2019, which presented an excellent opportunity to discuss expected outcomes in the context of the broader policy of the European Union on AI and its contribution to global discussions.
The international component of the discussion was based on the findings of the last report of the Diplo Foundation: "Mapping the challenges and opportunities of Artificial Intelligence for the conduct of diplomacy", commissioned by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland.