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The future of AI is being written now.

Europe must act to shape its own AI future based on our shared vision.

If we don't act, AI's impact on our lives, our thinking, our jobs and even our interpersonal and societal relations will be decided elsewhere.

Major breakthroughs

Many of the methodological developments in AI date back more than 50 years, the reason why we now pay so much attention to AI in general and Machine Learning (ML) in particular, is that the recent advances in computing power, availability of data, and new algorithms have led to major breakthroughs in the last 6-7 years.

The many applications of AI/ML have started entering into our every-day lives, from machine translations, to image recognition and music generation, and are increasingly exploited in industry, government, and commerce

AI, benefit or reason for concern?

Applications of AI can be extremely beneficial in fields as diverse as medicine, to improve diagnose of tumours and rare diseases, to agriculture to analyse individual plants and determine the precise amount of fertilizer or water needed.

On the other hand they can also be used in areas raising ethical concerns like political profiling, job screening, or sentencing in the criminal justice system

“Black box” model

Many AI techniques display nowadays some characteristics of a “black box” model i.e. we know what goes in and what comes out of the algorithm, but we do not have a full understanding of its inner workings.

This limits the scientific understanding of algorithms, the capability to recover from adversarial examples, and complicates human supervision in practical applications.

Cybersecurity

For example, when it comes to cybersecurity, AI is a double-edged sword: it can be greatly beneficial to increase the security of devices, systems, and applications, but can also empower those how seek to attack systems and networks and thus become an advanced tool in the arsenal for cyber-attacks.

The report

This report presents a European view of Artificial Intelligence (AI) based on independent research and analysis by the JRC to inform the debate at the European level.

Artificial Intelligence: A European perspective

Related Content

Report: Artificial Intelligence: A European perspective

Facts4EUFuture - a series of reports for the future of Europe