Extract from David Owen and Kenneth Ritz’s article “Increasing Reliance on AI Is Risky and the EU Attempts To Catch Up”
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing the world, with seemingly limitless potential to streamline and improve productivity and our daily lives. Massive investment continues to spur AI innovation across all industries, as companies and governments race to harness this transformational new power of automated analysis and decision-making.
AI bots now routinely act in the real world based on their own independent calculations, and can learn to perform many of the higher order tasks, from driving a car to doing taxes. Lawyers use them to draft documents. Doctors use them to diagnose patients.
Chinese authorities reportedly use them to score the ‘social credit’ of citizens. However, we also know that AI can be error-prone and highly mysterious in its internal operations. Reported AI challenges and risks range from relatively harmless inconveniences to the potentially apocalyptic.
Despite its impressive power and risk, the AI revolution has proceeded with essentially no legal rules or guidance for developers and users. Neither the rapidly growing industry nor lawmakers had offered any substantive framework or guidance to follow, until just recently when the EU adopted the Artificial Intelligence Act of the European Union ( AI Act or Act), considered the world’s first comprehensive regulatory framework on AI.
