A draft EU regulation on artificial intelligence risks exclusion of the social partners and lack of compliance with data-protection requirements.

Since AI involves interactions between machines and humans--rather than just the former replacing the latter--'explainable AI' is a new challenge. Intelligent systems, based on machine learning, are penetrating many aspects of our society. They span a large variety of applications--from the seemingly harmless automation of micro-tasks, such as the suggestion of synonymous phrases in text editors, to more contestable uses, such as in jail-or-release decisions, anticipating child-services interventions, predictive policing and many others. Researchers have shown that for some tasks, such as lung-cancer screening, intelligent systems are capable of outperforming humans. In many other cases, however, they have not lived up to exaggerated expectations.

Artificial intelligence is often associated with prophecies of job destruction. Yet an army of workers in the global south is being pressed into action. In discussions about the locations comprising the key productive nodes of artificial intelligence and other next-generation digital technologies, African workers rarely get a mention. Autonomous vehicles, machine-learning systems, next-generation search engines and recommendations systems--how many of these technologies are'made in Africa'? The answer, actually, is'all of them'.

As AI enters the workplace, we need to reflect upon the criteria by which human work is evaluated and human subjectivity depicted. Control panels are the obvious place to run operations centrally. The control rooms of Star Trek's fantastical Enterprise (and the hub of the actual Project Cybersyn under Chile's radical president Salvador Allende) in the 1960s and 70s were however operated by humans with relatively primitive technologies. Today, much of the work of the people we imagined in these rooms--the bouffanted women in silver A-line dresses and men in blue boiler suits pushing buttons to operate the manoeuvres of galactical imperialism--is done by computers. But what will happen when the proverbial windows looking out to the galaxies only display a cadre of robots and the control panels' blinking lights are the only reflective glimmer?

Continuing our series on artificial intelligence, AI can augment human work--if workers' representatives have a voice in implementing it. The discourse on artificial intelligence and work is shaped by conflicting narratives. Disempowering notions about mass unemployment and a loss of human control in the face of ever-more-powerful machines are widespread. But AI also inspires visions of human empowerment, according to which labour will be upgraded as machines support human effort and relieve us from the burden of onerous work, leaving us with more interesting, creative and cognitive tasks. Both narratives are one-sided, deriving projections as to the future of work from the nature of technology as such.

Much discussion of the future of work suggests it can only be a dystopian, robotic world. But the report of an ILO commission shows how humans, not algorithms, can be in charge. When the International Labour Organization (ILO) was founded 100 years ago in the aftermath of the first world war, governments, employers and workers came together convinced that lasting peace and stability depended on social justice. This is still true and, given the dramatic changes we are seeing, should encourage us to take bold and timely action. The constitution of the ILO of 1919, reinforced by the Philadelphia Declaration of 1944, remains the most ambitious global social contract in history.