The EU AI Act and the Wager on Trustworthy AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly supplementing or taking over tasks previously performed by humans. On the one hand, this relates to low-risk tasks, such as recommending books or movies, or recommending purchases based on previous buying behavior. But it also includes crucial decision making by highly autonomous systems. Many current systems are opaque in the sense that their internal principles of operation are unknown, leading to severe safety and regulation problems. Once trained, deep-learning systems perform well, but they are subject to surprising vulnerabilities when confronted with adversarial images.9 The decisions may be explicated after the fact, but these systems carry the risk of wrong decisions affecting the well being of people.