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A Critical Take on the Policy Recommendations of the EU High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2020

Michael VEALE Open the ORCID record for Michael VEALE [Opens in a new window]
Michael VEALE*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Laws, University College London and the Alan Turing Institute; email: m.veale@ucl.ac.uk.
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Abstract

The European Commission recently published the policy recommendations of its “High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence”: a heavily anticipated document, particularly in the context of the stated ambition of the new Commission President to regulate in that area. This article argues that these recommendations have significant deficits in a range of areas. It analyses a selection of the Group’s proposals in context of the governance of artificial intelligence more broadly, focusing on issues of framing, representation and expertise, and on the lack of acknowledgement of key issues of power and infrastructure underpinning modern information economies and practices of optimisation.

Type
Reports
Information
European Journal of Risk Regulation , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , e1
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019

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Footnotes

Thank you to Seda Gürses for her responsive term “low-level experts”, and for thinking through many of these issues in relation to our joint consultation response to the earlier HLEG-AI guidance. Thank you to the anonymous reviewer whose input improved this work. The author was supported by the Alan Turing Institute under EPSRC grant EP/N510129/1.

References

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12 HM Government, supra, note 7.

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18 This arose from an earlier communication, see European Commission, “Artificial Intelligence for Europe” (Communication from the Commission (SWD(2018) 137 final), April 2018).

19 High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence, “Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI” (April 2019).

20 T Metzinger, “Ethics Washing Made in Europe”, Der Tagesspiegel (18 April 2019) <www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/eu-guidelines-ethics-washing-made-in-europe/24195496.html> accessed 10 November 2019; “Dialogue Seminar on Artificial Intelligence: Ethical Concerns” (19 March 2019) <www.europarl.europa.eu/streaming/?event=20190319-1500-SPECIAL-SEMINAR1&start=2019-03-19T15:44:53Z&end=2019-03-19T15:56:00Z&language=en> accessed 10 November 2019.

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24 See generally Bardach, E, A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis: The Eightfold Path to More Effective Problem Solving (Sage 2012) (on the policy process).Google Scholar

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28 Hoppe, supra, note 26.

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30 High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence, supra, note 21, 24.

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34 These are representatives from Access Now, a digital rights organisation, and BEUC, an umbrella body for consumer rights groups.

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36 R Binns et al, “Third Party Tracking in the Mobile Ecosystem” in Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Web Science (WebSci ’18, New York, ACM 2018).

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40 European Data Protection Board, “First Overview on the Implementation of the GDPR and the Roles and Means of the National Supervisory Authorities” (Report presented to the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee (LIBE), 26 February 2019).

41 Information Commissioner’s Office, “Update Report into Adtech and Real Time Bidding” (20 June 2019).

42 Directive (EU) 2019/1024 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 June 2019 on open data and the re-use of public sector information OJ L 172/56 (2019) Art 5(2).

43 High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence, supra, note 21, 19–20.

44 ibid, 29–30.

45 See eg Brown, I and Marsden, CT, “Holistic Regulation of the Interoperable Internet” in Regulating Code: Good Governance and Better Regulation in the Information Age (The MIT Press 2013).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46 See the effort by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Twitter: Data Transfer Project, “Data Transfer Project Overview and Fundamentals” (White Paper, 20 July 2018).

47 High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence, supra, note 21, 39.

48 Gürses, S et al, “Stirring the POTs: Protective Optimization Technologies” in Bayamlıoğlu, E et al (eds), Being Profiled:Cogitas Ergo Sum (Amsterdam University Press 2018).Google Scholar

49 C Bowden, “The US Surveillance Programmes and Their Impact on EU Citizens’ Fundamental Rights” (Report for the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs 2013).

50 K Stephan, “Apple Versus the Feds: How a Smartphone Stymied the FBI” (2017) 6 IEEE Consumer Electronics Mag 103.

51 See generally Domingo-Ferrer, J et al, Privacy and Data Protection by Design–from Policy to Engineering (ENISA 2014)Google Scholar; The Royal Society, Protecting Privacy in Practice: The Current Use, Development and Limits of Privacy Enhancing Technologies in Data Analysis (The Royal Society 2019).

52 Gürses et al, supra, note 48.

53 See eg K Yeung, “‘Hypernudge’: Big Data as a Mode of Regulation by Design” (2017) 20 Information, Communication & Society 118.