The European Union is finalizing a list that it will prepare together with the 27 countries in which it will establish which are the current technologies that can be considered a security risk of the States that compose it and among them AI has a prominent place.
This is not the first warning about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence, but it is undoubtedly one of the most alarming about the risks it can pose.
Artificial Intelligence is a risk
The European Commission has released a preliminary list of four technology areas that present the greatest risk from being misused to prop up autocratic regimes and violate human rights.
These four technologies include AI, as well as next-generation microchips, quantum computing and genetic engineering. All of these areas will be reviewed to determine whether their exports and imports pose a danger to the security of the European Union as a whole. It will be the 27 States that make up the European Union that will have to issue their assessments on this list of high-risk technologies, which puts Artificial Intelligence at the same level of danger as weapons such as threat to the integrity of a State.
This preliminary list is part of the European Union’s strategy to limit risk areas promoted by the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen. This has the main objective of reducing excess vulnerabilities and dependencies that the EU has accumulated over several decades without putting up barriers to the free market.
Relying too much can go against security
Excessive dependence on technologies could weaken the European Union and turn against national security, “wreaking havoc on entire industries and putting thousands of jobs at risk.”
«Technology is currently at the center of geopolitical competition. And the EU wants to be a player, not a playing field.”has said about it Věra JourováVice President of Values and Transparency of the European Commission.
«This is not against any country. We do what we believe is in the general interest of our fellow citizens. “When we see that there is a risk of overdependence, a risk of disruption of a supply chain that could be critical for us, we take action, we don’t wait.”has assured Thierry BretonEuropean Commissioner for the Internal Market.
The four technologies have been chosen for their transformative and constantly evolving nature and for their “imminent” potential to be misused for military purposes and to violate human rights, such as mass surveillance. These are the following:
- Advanced Semiconductorsincluding microelectronics, photonics, high-frequency chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment.
- Artificial intelligenceincluding high-performance computing, cloud and edge computing, data analytics, computer vision, language processing, and object recognition.
- Quantum technologyincluding quantum computing, quantum cryptography, quantum communications, and quantum sensing and radar.
- Biotechnologyincluding genetic modification techniques, new genomic techniques, gene drive and synthetic biology.
