Lu, who wears a black T-shirt and glasses, pulls a bag out from under his scooter seat then heads down to the beach. "Oh!" exclaims the 43-year-old once making it down to the shore. Lu bends down to pick up a worn plastic bottle that has washed up beside his foot and puts it in his bag. "Wet Chinese plastic," he says flatly. He points to the simplified Chinese characters on the packaging indicating the bottle's origin – mainland China. Lu is not at the beach to stroll among the rusty anti-landing spikes protruding from concrete blocks – a reminder of Kinmen's role as a front-line island between China and Taiwan. Nor has he come to marvel at the lights that now glitter in the dusk from the skyscrapers of the Chinese metropolis of Xiamen, less than 10km (6.2 miles) away across Xiamen Bay. Instead, he has come to the western coast of Kinmen to collect rubbish. When Lu is not working as an administrator at a local tourism office, he contributes to keeping Kinmen clean by picking up rubbish. Tides, weather and ocean currents as well as Kinmen's proximity to Xiamen and the mouth of the polluted Jiulong River in China have left the island exposed to large quantities of waste.

Now, I think there are very few people that disagree with the idea that the development of artificial intelligence needs some guardrails, and I applaud efforts to create a standard for the rest of the world to follow. The only issue is that the EU isn't exactly a world leader when it comes to AI. Speaking at Microsoft's Data Science and Law forum earlier this month, Guntram Wolff, director of Brussels-based economic think tank Bruegel, explained to me that of the 30 leading AI patents out there, only four are from European applicants. Of what are considered to be the 100 most exciting startups in AI from around the world, there are only two operating in Europe (excluding the UK, more on that later). Wolff has previously expressed doubt over the EU's ability to maintain relevance in this space, and has urged the EU to invest more in artificial intelligence or else risk an over-reliance on services from other countries, namely the US and China - services which could be disrupted or even withdrawn in times of crisis. I'm not going to touch on those issues, as Wolff has already expertly explored this in his Politico piece.