A European digital public sphere has to be engineered--but that doesn't mean pursuing an AI dystopia or creating a European Facebook. In the early 20th century Simone Weil wrote: 'Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating.' Fascinated by the romantic and varied evils presumably awaiting humanity in the face of Ray Kurzweil's artificial-intelligence'singularity', many institutions and expert groups around the world proceeded to draw up lists of values to be respected, no matter how dystopic our transhumanistic future would be. A few prominent examples are the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the European Commission, with its high-level expert group on AI. Important value principles were endorsed for future AI systems, such as human oversight, safety, privacy, transparency, fairness and wellbeing.

During 2020-2021, Finland will provide European citizens with free access to an online course named'The Elements of AI'. The initiative, which aims to offer EU citizens free training in future skills, was made public in Brussels on 10 December 2019, in the margins of the meeting of the EU employment ministers. The course, already published in Finnish, English, Swedish and Estonia, will be made available in all the official EU languages soon, informed the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment. This initiative by the Finnish Presidency aims to respond to the challenges posed by the transformation of work and to reinforce the digital leadership of the EU. 'The Elements of AI' is a series of free online courses created by the University of Helsinki and the Finnish tech company Reaktor.

Sometimes, the tide of technological innovation seems unstoppable. But tech companies still have to abide by laws, rules and regulations, like the rest of us. Moreover, governments and other regulatory bodies are increasingly concerned with ensuring that basic rights and liberties don't get washed away as the digital future rushes in. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provides a great example of how regulations will shape the development of powerful new technologies like big data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence. GDPR is a new European Union regulation that will come into force in late May 2018.

A French journalist has revealed how she discovered the dating app Tinder had 800 pages of personal data about her. Judith Duportail said she discovered the app had gathered massive amounts of data about her age, gender, interests, the people she had dated or spoken to, where she went and where she lived over a period of several years she used it. She said that with the help of a privacy activist group, personaldata.io, The US company is required under EU data protection rules to hand over any information it holds on any European citizen if they ask for it. The process involves an email to the privacyinquiries@gotinder.com email address with a clear and precise list of all the information you want with the subject line "Subject Access Request".