PARTNERS' & EXTERNALS' PERSPECTIVE
ARE WE READY FOR THE DIGITAL ERA? Yannick Meneceur
Head of the Digital Development Unit Council of Europe
The speed at which our society and our lifestyles are being transformed by digital technologies is unprecedented. Artificial intelligence ("AI") is certainly one of the main drivers of this transformation, at the heart of a growing number of services that already populate our daily lives. The term "AI", whose content has evolved substantially since its creation in 1955, has been reenchanted since the early 2010s and now refers to the various machine learning algorithms (such as deep learning), whose processing results have appeared to be particularly spectacular not only for image or sound recognition, but also for natural language processing. For several decades, public decision-makers have been promoting the development of computer science and digital technologies, convinced by the promise of improving our lives, as well as by the prospects of ever more dizzying economic profits, which are now counted in billions of billions of euros. In the competition for the development of "AI" in particular, international and regional regulators, such as the Council of Europe, the European Commission, the OECD or UNESCO are intervening in their respective fields of competence to try to frame the effervescence of initiatives. The idea for all the regulators is to use the law both as a technique for supervising the use of these new tools in order to prevent the significant 6 | SYNERGY Magazine
risks they pose to the respect of a certain number of the most fundamental rights and values, but also as an instrument for stimulating and developing the market. On reading the texts already drafted or in the process of being drafted, the future of the governance of this technology looks rather balanced, between respect for human rights, economic objectives, and ethical requirements, with intergovernmental organisations that seem to agree on the need to set up mechanisms for verifying "AI" before it is put into service or introduced onto the market. As it stands, one could be satisfied with the progress made in such a short time, remembering that it took decades in other industrial fields, such as pharmaceuticals, to reach this kind of maturity. However, the capacity of some of these new legal instruments to effectively prevent violations of fundamental rights and create a real "trustworthy AI" remains questionable for some. And if we ask ourselves the more general question of our preparation to face the challenges of the digital era, we must admit that the current discourses respond to each other with a relatively identical critical argumentation, creating a form of consensus consisting in only questioning the risks of infringement of the rights and freedoms of individuals, but without ever questioning the relevance of the real project of society that underlies
