AI cannot be regulated by technical measures alone

Any attempt to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) must not rely solely on technical measures to mitigate potential harms, and should instead move to address the fundamental power imbalances between those who develop or deploy the technology and those who are subject to it, says a report commissioned by European Digital Rights (EDRi). Published on 21 September 2021, the 155-page report Beyond debiasing: regulating AI and its inequalities specifically criticised the European Union's (EU) "technocratic" approach to AI regulation, which it said was too narrowly focused on implementing technical bias mitigation measures, otherwise known as "debiasing", to be effective at preventing the full range of AI-related harms. The European Commission's (EC) proposed Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) was published in April 2021 and sought to create a risk-based, market-led approach to regulating AI through the establishment of self-assessments, transparency procedures and various technical standards. Digital civil rights experts and organisations have previously told Computer Weekly that although the regulation is a step in the right direction, it will ultimately fail to protect people's fundamental rights and mitigate the technology's worst abuses because it does not address the fundamental power imbalances between tech firms and those who are subject to their systems. The EDRi-commissioned report said that while European policymakers have publicly recognised that AI can produce a broad range of harms across different domains – including employment, housing, education, health and policing – their laser focus on algorithmic debiasing stems from a misunderstanding of the existing techniques and their effectiveness.