I welcome the Communications made by the Commission on the 25th of April 2018 and on the 7th of December 2018. In my opinion, a proposal of hard law would have been more efficient to send the message the EU is practically creating a common legislative framework on AI and to prevent from a fragmentation of the market. Such legislative proposal could have ensured the defense of European values. The goal of a Trustworthy AI through ethical purpose and technical robustness requirements promoted by this working document is a good thing. However, I would like to do some comments.

AI might not seem to have a huge personal impact if your most frequent brush with machine-learning algorithms is through Facebook's news feed or Google's search rankings. But at the Data for Black Lives conference last weekend, technologists, legal experts, and community activists snapped things into perspective with a discussion of America's criminal justice system. There, an algorithm can determine the trajectory of your life. At the end of 2016, nearly 2.2 million adults were being held in prisons or jails, and an additional 4.5 million were in other correctional facilities. Put another way, 1 in 38 adult Americans was under some form of correctional supervision. The nightmarishness of this situation is one of the few issues that unite politicians on both sides of the aisle.

Computing professionals' actions change the world. To act responsibly, they should reflect upon the wider impacts of their work, consistently supporting the public good. The ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct ("the Code") expresses the conscience of the profession. The Code is designed to inspire and guide the ethical conduct of all computing professionals, including current and aspiring practitioners, instructors, students, influencers, and anyone who uses computing technology in an impactful way. Additionally, the Code serves as a basis for remediation when violations occur. The Code includes principles formulated as statements of responsibility, based on the understanding that the public good is always the primary consideration. Each principle is supplemented by guidelines, which provide explanations to assist computing professionals in understanding and applying the principle.

Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott believes understanding AI in the future will help people become better citizens. "I think to be a well-informed citizen in the 21st century, you need to know a little bit about this stuff [AI] because you want to be able to participate in the debates. You don't want to be someone to whom AI is sort of this thing that happens to you. You want to be an active agent in the whole ecosystem," he said. In an interview with VentureBeat in San Francisco this week, Scott shared his thoughts on the future of AI, including facial recognition software and manufacturing automation.

The field of artificial intelligence will be one of the biggest areas where different players will be working to establish regulatory guardrails and answer ethical questions in the future. Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov wrote his influential laws of robotics in the first half of the 20th century, and reality is now catching up to fiction. Questions over the ethics of AI and its potential applications are numerous: What constitutes bias within the algorithms? What privacy measures should be employed? And just how much control should humans retain in applying AI-driven automation?

The World Economic Forum (WEF) is upon us this week, and the Future of Work is one of its key themes. This is a good opportunity to catch up on the trends unfolding in this domain right now, and to ponder on the insights of the people taking note and shaping this discussion. Automation and AI is part of this discussion as well, with the jury still out as to how exactly this will shape labor, workforce dynamics, and workplace transformation among others. Based on the WEF's latest report on the Future of Jobs, we highlight the major forces at play today. We discuss how these effect the technology behind the job market with Panos Alexopoulos, Head of Ontology at Textkernel, a Careerbuilder company.

A NEW commodity spawns a lucrative, fast-growing industry, prompting antitrust regulators to step in to restrain those who control its flow. A century ago, the resource in question was oil. Now similar concerns are being raised by the giants that deal in data, the oil of the digital era. These titans--Alphabet (Google's parent company), Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft--look unstoppable. They are the five most valuable listed firms in the world.

Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott believes understanding AI in the future will help people be better citizens. "I think to be a well-informed citizen in the 21st century, you need to know a little bit about this stuff [AI] because you want to be able to participate in the debates. You don't want to be someone to whom AI is sort of this thing that happens to you. You want to be an active agent in the whole ecosystem," he said. In an interview with VentureBeat in San Francisco this week, Scott shared his thoughts on the future of AI, including facial recognition software and manufacturing automation.

NO one at the beginning of the 2000s could have predicted what is happening today in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). No one would have bet that in such a short span of time, Artificial Intelligence algorithms would become so pervasive and would be at work in a wide range of activities of our daily lives, from driving our car to unlocking our smartphone, to getting recommendations for our next purchase. Indeed, Artificial Intelligence algorithms are all around us, even if we don't know about it; and it is here to stay. The reason for this astonishing progress lies not so much in the invention of brand-new sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms, but rather in the sheer availability of huge amounts of data and a formidable computational power. This allows us to apply time-honoured machine learning models loosely inspired by the functioning of the brain which, as it turns out, work remarkably well.

A top Google executive recently sent a shot across the bow of its competitors regarding face surveillance. Kent Walker, the company's general counsel and senior vice president of global affairs, made it clear that Google -- unlike Amazon and Microsoft -- will not sell a face recognition product until the technology's potential for abuse is addressed. Face recognition, powered by artificial intelligence, could allow the government to supercharge surveillance by automating identification and tracking. Authorities could use it to track protesters, target vulnerable communities (such as immigrants), and create digital policing in communities of color that are already subject to pervasive police monitoring. So how are the world's biggest technology companies responding to this serious threat to privacy, safety and civil rights?