Last month, the EU took steps to flesh out their emerging digital strategy with the release of two white papers, one on AI regulation, and the other on a European data strategy. In a previous post, we looked at the EU's plans for AI regulation, and the lessons the U.S. should be taking from their approach. In this post, we turn to the EU's data strategy, which lays out an action plan for the EU as it works to take advantage on the opportunities presented by the data economy. Most of the proposals included in the EU's white paper stick close to what are by now familiar themes for government digital strategies: the opening of high-value public datasets for private use, investment in building digital skills among individuals and SMEs, the promotion of new technical standards to improve interoperability, and the strengthening of governance mechanisms to facilitate the flow of data across and within sectors. But two of the strategy's goals reveal more ambitious plans by the EU.

The technology to power connected cities exists today--and continued growth is predicted. Will all our cities soon be connected? Or do hurdles stand in the way? Perhaps one of the biggest challenge will be overcoming regulatory hurdles that could slow the progress down. Technavio says the autonomous bus market, as an example, will grow by 2364 units during 2020 and 2024, which is a growth rate of 32%.

BlackLine, Inc. (Nasdaq: BL) announced today that Sophia Velastegui of Microsoft has joined the accounting automation software leader's board of directors, effective March 16th, 2020, bringing the number of female directors on BlackLine's board to three. A widely recognized technology industry leader and artificial intelligence (AI) expert, Ms. Velastegui will draw on her more than 20 years of experience at global technology trailblazers Microsoft, Google and Apple to help BlackLine maintain its leadership position and guide the company through its next phase of growth. "Sophia has an incredible technology background and is recognized as one of the foremost engineers in the field," said BlackLine CEO Therese Tucker. "She'll bring that experience and knowledge to our board and will help ensure that BlackLine utilizes the latest AI, machine learning and other predictive and emerging technologies to continue to innovate and serve our customers. And, she shares my passion, advocating for diversity in technology and leadership."

Centralized state camera surveillance is but one component of a burgeoning practice of personal data collection paired with artificial intelligence (AI). Camera surveillance is not inherently unlawful and has long been used at border-crossings, airports, and other high-security areas. However, recent technological advances have contributed to the spread of a more intrusive form of video surveillance that includes powerful, if imperfect, facial recognition abilities and AI decision making. While the technology offers states the ability to, among other things, identify lost children, identify criminals, and monitor threats, the new capacity also raises significant human rights issues. The use of camera surveillance has grown with leaps in technology, including the introduction of videocassette recorders in the 1970s and the internet in the 1990s.

Is the EU's approach to regulating artificial intelligence misguided? Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming society for the better. We're using it to improve services and save lives. Applications range from fighting fraud to preventing forest fires and creating new medicines. The EU's desire to be the world leader in AI and to protect citizens is laudable, but its regulatory stance risks having the opposite effect.

This week saw the return, for a third season, of the critically acclaimed HBO series Westworld. WW's central premise in its first 2 seasons was a theme park, sometime in the near future, populated by highly realistic robots or'hosts'. Human guests can pay exorbitant sums to interact with these robots, in a huge range of ways. In the'western' themed area – after which the show is named – guests can choose to be white-hatted heroes or black-hatted villains. The good guys get to be brave, chivalrous, honourable and generally decent.

But even by the usual standards, artificial intelligence has had a turbulent run. Is AI a society-renewing hero or a jobs-destroying villain? As always, the truth is not so categorical. At more than 1,000 pages, Thomas Piketty's doorstop sequel to his previous opus, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, does not disappoint. But whether it will fundamentally change the global debate about inequality is an open question. As a general-purpose technology, AI will be what we make of it, with its ultimate impact determined by the governance frameworks we build.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) may play an increasingly essentialFootnote 1 role in criminal acts in the future. Criminal acts are defined here as any act (or omission) constituting an offence punishable under English criminal law,Footnote 2 without loss of generality to jurisdictions that similarly define crime. Evidence of "AI-Crime" (AIC) is provided by two (theoretical) research experiments. In the first one, two computational social scientists (Seymour and Tully 2016) used AI as an instrument to convince social media users to click on phishing links within mass-produced messages. Because each message was constructed using machine learning techniques applied to users' past behaviours and public profiles, the content was tailored to each individual, thus camouflaging the intention behind each message. If the potential victim had clicked on the phishing link and filled in the subsequent web-form, then (in real-world circumstances) a criminal would have obtained personal and private information that could be used for theft and fraud. AI-fuelled crime may also impact commerce. In the second experiment, three computer scientists (Martínez-Miranda et al. 2016) simulated a market and found that trading agents could learn and execute a "profitable" market manipulation campaign comprising a set of deceitful false-orders. These two experiments show that AI provides a feasible and fundamentally novel threat, in the form of AIC. The importance of AIC as a distinct phenomenon has not yet been acknowledged. The literature on AI's ethical and social implications focuses on regulating and controlling AI's civil uses, rather than considering its possible role in crime (Kerr 2004).

In fact, the idea is really two fold. We take all that data that was collected in 2016 and they had already put all that time in to labeling. And now hopefully we can train the model and then do two things. One is the next flight. When they come back with lots and lots of images, hopefully we can require much less human time to annotate all of those.