There is a parallel between France’s priorities during its Presidency in the field of digital and technological technology and the excellent report by MEP Axel VOSS on Artificial Intelligence.

Europe is caught in a technology dilemma. It is on a form of crest line that it must seek to implement its particular approach regarding technology and particularly that of Artificial Intelligence.
I speak of a dilemma because we are faced with two injunctions, in a way contradictory.

The first injunction concerns Europe’s lagging behind in innovation and technology, and I can give just one figure, if we take the 10 largest companies in the world, 8 are in the technology sector, 6 did not exist 25 years ago and none is European.
The European technological challenge comes first from this.

Because it has technological consequences, it has economic consequences and it has democratic consequences, whether technological and economic sovereignty precedes democratic sovereignty.

In our everyday life this translates into the prevalence of Anglo-Saxon tools, to communicate, to maintain social relations, to move us, to seek information. If we want to ensure that European values prevail in the World, and have the choice, then the first thing to do is to focus on catching up.This is true for technology and even more true for artificial intelligence.

In this area the lead taken by the very large American and Chinese companies is excessively important, except in the B to B areas where we can still play widely. However, in the B to C domains, the size of the data lakes accumulated by American and Chinese companies, the exponential effect of the accumulation of this data, puts us in a situation where we are lagging behind.

The second injunction concerns regulation, there is currently in Europe, in the World a tension around the consequences of this technology, fears, sometimes justified sometimes unjustified, but we must consider that there is a democratic doubt, a doubt in our populations about how our societies evolve.

We saw at the heart of what happened, with Brexit, with the yellow vests in France, with the events in the United States-United, that the fear of the consequences of technology and artificial intelligence in particular in our daily lives is today one of the elements of the democratic malaise that we have in Europe.

And if I had to draw a parallel with what happened during the mechanization period at the end of the 19th century-early 20th century when the train appeared, for the first time people had to get into vehicles that they didn’t understand
which created fears, until the public authorities created standards, regulated and standardized train travel. In a way we have to do exactly the same thing. It is in this tension that the solution must be found, and I believe that this is at the heart of Axel Voss’ report on the European regulation of artificial intelligence.
Yes, we must regulate, but we must always regulate, keeping in mind, as the report Europe is on the loosing side of AI today states, that the main issue we are facing is innovation.

If we go into the challenges of regulating artificial intelligence, I would like to mention a few.
At this stage France during its Presidency will do its work to advance the discussions within the Council and in resonance within the Parliament, I believe that the Regulation has today the right approach because it has an approach to risks, we can’t bag all the AI systems, depending on the protocols used, depending on the use cases, these are not the same risks and we must globally advance this capacity within our legislative corpus to integrate elements of code and technological protocols, technological protocols are not a whole, they ask extremely different questions depending on their design.

I therefore think that the Commission’s proposal for a regulation is balanced.

One of the main challenges we will have with the regulation of artificial intelligence, and it is very related to the question of innovation, is the question of the implementation of this regulation with two main challenges:

• The ability to maintain a single market, we must learn from what has not been entirely successful in previous regulations, as a regulation so important for the competitiveness of the European Union, there can be no establishment that is not extremely unified throughout the territory of the European Union because this could create differences in competitiveness that are prohibitive in this area.
• And the second thing we need to be able to respond to is…,
  it is legitimate for Europe to set conditions, for example on the way artificial intelligence algorithms are managed or developed, but this has consequences in terms of trade policy because, if we consider that a European company must have legitimate constraints to develop such and such an algorithm, then we must assure this European company that an algorithm developed under different conditions on the other side of the Atlantic or in Asia cannot access the European market, Otherwise we will create a crowding-out effect of European algorithms and European companies that may be extremely complicated.

I believe that we have an extraordinary opportunity to continue to shape technology and the technological world in the image of Europe’s values, that this regulation has come, that it has the right approach, but that the question of its implementation will be one of the challenges that will still be before us.