The EU is funding dystopian Artificial Intelligence projects

Despite its commitment to'trustworthy' artificial intelligence, the EU is bankrolling AI projects that are questionable, write Fieke Jansen and Daniel Leufer. Fieke Jansen is a PhD candidate at the Data Justice Lab and Mozilla Foundation Fellow 2019-2020. Daniel Leufer, PhD, is a Mozilla Foundation Fellow 2019-2020 hosted by Access Now and member of the Working Group on Philosophy of Technology at KU Leuven, Belgium. Discussions on the negative impact of Artificial Intelligence in society include horror stories plucked from either China's high-tech surveillance state and its use of the controversial social credit system, or from the US and its use of recidivism algorithms and predictive policing. Typically, Europe is excluded from these stories, due to the perception that EU citizens are protected from such AI-fueled nightmares through the legal protection offered by the GDPR, or because there is simply no horror-inducing AI deployed across the continent. In contrast to this perception, journalists and NGOs have shown that imperfect and ethically questionable AI systems such as facial recognition, fraud detection and smart (a.k.a surveillance) cities, are also in use across Europe.