European values

But Sridhar Iyengar, Managing Director at Zoho Europe, a technology company with foundations in Chennai, India, later described it as “a huge milestone in the development of this emerging technology”. He added: “While guidance is needed and welcomed, regulators must also be careful not to stifle innovation. “Artificial Intelligence is becoming increasingly integrated into business processes, offering benefits to aid fraud detection, forecasting, sentiment analysis, deep analysis of data and more. However, it’s crucial to manage the use of AI responsibly, with effective guardrails in place to mitigate risks.

“As governments work on guidance and regulations, businesses should prioritise developing their own policies which go further to protect themselves and their customers. This will enable organisations to have more agility to react to market trends and serve their customers effectively, all while maintaining a high level of trust around how data is collected, stored and used, for example. It will be interesting to see how regulation develops further through a global and collaborative approach to support businesses.

“Academia, government, industry experts and businesses must continue to work together to educate and to ensure the safe and successful deployment of AI to potentially deliver significant economic benefit.”

Konstantinos Komaitis, a fellow and senior researcher at the Lisbon Council, noted the significance of the agreements reached by the European Commission, the European Council, and the European Parliament being political, adding: “The political agreements are not necessarily agreements over the expectations citizens have and, to this end, Europe is still quite far from having a comprehensive piece of legislation.”

Graham Brookie, vice president of the Washington-based Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, said the Act was “important because it is first – not because it is the most comprehensive”.

It will “undoubtedly be designed to build on the EU’s Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, which are public and now being implemented. In particular, the transparency and information-sharing standards in the Digital Services Act will likely be the most solid indicator of what the AI Act could eventually do. In the world of AI governance, the White House’s executive order sticks out as more concrete guidance to industry, but it sorely needs a legislative companion in the US Congress”. Enza Iannopollo, analyst at the research and advisory group Forrester, was more optimistic. “Despite the criticism, this is good news for businesses and society,” he said. “It starts providing companies with a solid framework for the assessment and mitigation of risks, that, if unchecked, could hurt customers and curtail businesses’ ability to benefit from their investments in the technology. And for society, it helps protect people from detrimental outcomes.”

Whatever the issues, such developments may be timely, given AI’s impact across the entire industrial landscape, moving beyond well-known technologies such as big data, robotics and IoT - one reason why almost half of companies plan to begin or increase their investments to integrate it into their businesses this year.

A common view is that any preconceived assumptions about the prospects are likely to be wrong, especially when it comes to any endpoint to its potential.

Its adoption by leading tech players such as Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Amazon who are committing billions to create new products and services and the way universities are now making it a more prominent element of their curricula is helping to ensure that.

Former Google Brain leader and Baidu chief scientist Andrew Ng summed this up when he said: “We may be in the eternal spring of AI.” Nowhere is that better demonstrated than in industry which has a vested interest in staying ahead:

On the move: which involves everything from self-driving cars to flight forecasting to travel planners and more personalised booking procedures.

In the factory: where developments have come a long way since AI-driven robotic arms, the earliest examples of which date back to the 1960s. The industrial robotics market was estimated at more than €48bn last year.

On the ward: Thanks to its big data analysis capabilities, AI is now helping to identify diseases faster and with greater accurately, Drug discovery is also more streamlined and virtual nursing assistants are increasingly monitoring patients. And there’s a human impact that goes way beyond the threat to jobs; one that involves filling the creativity gaps that AI can’t and the need to retrain people out of repetitive jobs and into ones that involve programing and supporting emerging technologies.

One of the leading authorities on the subject, UC Berkeley’s Prof Stuart Russell, one of the signatories of an open letter last year calling for a pause on AI training, gave an interesting take on emerging concerns in an interview with Vox.com’s The Gray Area when he said: “I think it’s important to understand that almost nobody is saying that the state of AI right now is such that we have to worry about AI systems taking over the world, if you want to put it that way. They still exhibit many limitations, and at least the latest generation, the large language models like ChatGPT, don’t exhibit the kinds of decision-making capabilities and all the planning capabilities that you would need to take over the world.

“You can try playing chess with them, for example. They’re pretty hopeless. They pretend well for a few moves, and then they’ll play a move that’s completely illegal because they haven’t actually learned the rules properly. There’s a lot of progress that we still need to make before we reach systems that are fully comparable or better than a human mind.” All this from a man who once told an audience in London that he wouldn’t talk to journalists “unless they agree not to put a Terminator robot in the article”.