Lhe hard-fought political agreement on Friday, December 8 on the draft European regulation on artificial intelligence (AI) probably marks the end of a fierce regulatory cycle, which will have marked the last five years. Since the von der Leyen Commission took office, we have witnessed a flood of texts which have made Europe the digital regulator for the rest of the world. For many, this abundance hides an inability to act.
And, in fact, as rarely before, the negotiation of the regulation on artificial intelligence will unfortunately have pitted those who are pro-regulation against those who are pro-innovation in a dialectic that makes us forget how much regulation is part of the cycle of innovation in that it determines its course. To become an innovation, an invention must be welcomed into the social fabric.
This is done through usage, but also through this expression of collective will that is law. Its role is then to assure us, through democratic deliberation, that the technological race we are embarking on is the right one. To neglect this is, otherwise, to believe that technology will itself solve the problems it creates, or that we can only act correctively.
Conversely, Europe offers us the possibility of making our principles of openness, our fundamental freedoms or even our aspiration for peace reign over technological development. So let’s take advantage of it, and remember that there is no point in embarking on a race whose finish line is undoubtedly a wall. We can rejoice in never having started this race.
Risk management
How good it was identified over the last five years, risk management has become the primary compass of European digital regulation, and the regulation on artificial intelligence currently being finalized is perhaps the most successful expression of this.
If it is understandable that the responsibility of the legislator is first to protect us from the most significant risks, we can agree on the fact that this does not constitute a viable political objective in the long term. Governing solely by risk would not mean building a social project, but simply picking up the pieces. Before the emergence of systems, we must establish the necessary milestones but also the positive objectives that we want to achieve. This ties in well with the structuring role that regulation must have in the deployment of innovation.
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