How times change, said Pieter Haeck on Politico (Brussels). When world leaders gathered to discuss artificial intelligence at Bletchley Park a mere 15 months ago, their main preoccupation was with safety – with whether this rapidly developing technology could, you know, "make humanity extinct". Yet those worries are all terribly passé, apparently.
The declaration from last week's AI summit in Paris "mentioned safety only three times"; rather, it stated that AI development had to be "open" and "inclusive", resulting in the US and UK refusing to sign it altogether. With the new fixation on unlocking growth, politicians from around the globe loudly vowed to cut red tape, invest and innovate. "I'm not here to talk about AI safety," insisted US Vice-President J.D. Vance. "I'm here to talk about AI opportunity." "Europe is open for AI and for business," declared the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen.
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I'm sorry, said Laurent Duraisin in Le Quotidien (Eschsur-Alzette), but have we lost our minds? The AI revolution is still in its infancy and already is full of horrors – "infamous deepfakes", AI-generated fraud, you name it: each time this tech develops, so does its ability to wreak havoc. And it's not as if we can rely on the tech giants to protect us. "The geniuses of Silicon Valley", with their mammoth monopolies, find no trouble getting around any national laws that get in the way of their company's bottom line, even without legislators making it easy for them.
In short, the EU can try to regulate the potential dangers, but the world's largest AI power won't be participating – leaving the old continent at risk of falling even further behind. For its part, the Trump administration is clearly rattled by China, said the FT. But by boldly ripping the guardrails off AI, it's making "a potentially reckless bet – that it can master this game-changing technology first, without anything going wrong along the way".
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