EU Commission expects first bloc-wide AI law to be adopted this year
The EU Commission expects agreement in the European Union this year on the first Artificial Intelligence (AI) law, although it admits the new rules will not come into force until 2025, according to Digital Commissioner Margrethe Vestager in an interview.
In an interview with Lusa and other European media in Brussels regarding the fourth meeting of the EU Trade and Technology Council with the US, where AI regulation will be addressed, Vestager said that, even with an agreement this year at the European level, “that would still take at least one, if not two years, to come into force”.
“We hope to have the first trilogue on the AI law in Europe before the summer, which would mean that if we work hard on it, we could have a result by the end of the year,” the European Commission’s executive vice-president in charge of A Europe Fit for the Digital Age and Competition, Vestager said.
“Which means we need something to bridge that time period because the development of AI right now seems to be exponential, and a lot of good things can be said about democracy, but the speed of the work is not exponential,” said Vestager, adding that “this is not criticising anyone, […] it just means that there are a huge number of issues to be discussed when it comes to making full use” of this technology.
In previewing this meeting, which takes place in Lulea under Sweden’s EU Council presidency, Vestager noted that AI “has been a constant on the agenda” between the EU and the US notably because “there is a huge potential for productivity and one of the concerns in the European Union is that productivity growth has been rather slow.”
The pace of negotiations at the EU level on this law proposed two years ago, has also been slow, so according to Vestager, starting talks before the summer would make it possible to “start the technical work” with a view to political agreements, with “the Council being much closer to the Commission’s proposal” than Parliament.
The European Commission presented a proposal to regulate AI systems in April 2021, the first EU legislation which aims to safeguard the EU’s fundamental values and rights and the safety of users by obliging systems considered high risk to meet mandatory requirements related to their reliability.
This will then be the first regulation aimed at AI, although the creators and developers of this technology are already subject to European legislation on fundamental rights, consumer protection and rules on product safety and liability.
Additional requirements are expected to be introduced to address risks, such as human supervision or clear information obligations on the capabilities and limitations of artificial intelligence.
AI is increasingly being used in areas such as entertainment (personalisation of content), online commerce (predicting consumer tastes), household appliances (intelligent programming) and electronic equipment (use of virtual assistants such as Siri or Alexa, among others).
The European Commission has been trying to strengthen cooperation between member states regarding AI, but there is still no common legal framework, so the goal is to move from a voluntary approach to the regulatory sphere.
(Ana Matos Neves, edited by Cristina Cardoso – Lusa.pt)
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