An Ambitious Agenda or Big Words? Developing a European Approach to AI
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a key area of global strategic competition, offering potentially revolutionary solutions for commercial, civil, and military applications. While the European Union (EU) has recently taken action as regards the AI’s disruptive potential, it arguably lags in its funding, research, and innovation as compared to the United States or China. Recent policy and funding initiatives at the EU level are shaping a distinctive approach to tackle such challenges, both via increased financing opportunities to address research and innovation gaps and through preventive governance mechanisms for the AI’s responsible technological design and uses. The question remains whether these actions will mitigate the European governance and funding gaps in this emerging technological domain and foster a globally competitive European AI ecosystem.
(Photo credit: European Commission, European-Union, 1995-2019)