Human extinction or a dictatorship of machines are some of the destinations that science fiction and the most catastrophic assure that the development of artificial intelligence will bring. To the European Commissioner for Competition of the EU, however, she does not believe that none of this will happen but she does fear that AI will contribute to further increasing inequality between people.
Margrethe Vestager has assured on the BBC that “barriers” must be established to control AI, whose potential to amplify discrimination, she defines as the great danger that we must face in the coming years. Vestager thus refers to the prejudices that may be contained in the enormous amounts of data extracted from the Internet that are used to train models and tools. According to her vision, this biased information can be potentially dangerous for the development of our societies.
“If a bank uses artificial intelligence to decide whether to grant you a mortgage or whether to take care of you with the social services that are in charge of your municipality, you will want to make sure that they do not discriminate against you because of your sex, your color or your zip code,” says Vestager. .
For this reason, he emphasizes the most imminent and realistic threat posed by AI: “The probability of the risk of extinction is quite small. I think that the risks of AI are rather that people are discriminated against, that they are not seen for what they are”, highlights the European official.
Vestager calls for AI regulations and regulations to be developed despite the fact that its rapid development may make them obsolete, in addition to pointing out the threat that this technology poses to manipulate democracy and elections: “If your social feed can be scanned to obtain a complete profile of you, the risk of being manipulated is enormous,” he says.
However, he also highlights the advantages that AI can offer and does not close the door on facial recognition: “We want to put strict limits so that it is not used in real time, but only in specific circumstances in which a missing child is being searched for. or there is a terrorist fleeing ”, explains Vestager in the middle of the EU debate on this technology.
