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The European Herald
Your bulletin on European news

10/12/2023
A Green New Deal

Last week in Brussels

This week the European Landscape was filled with several important deals occurring at all the levels of the legislative process, lets rewind together and take a closer look at what happened this week in the Union.

🤖 AI Act

After a 3 days non-stop negotiation, the Eu institutions reached a provisional agreement on the AI act, project the union forward in its endeavour to regulate AI technology, putting it at the forefront of this global struggle. The first of its kind, regulation envision a 4 risk level system in which to divide AI applications, with different kind of limitations, with the higher risk level (that comprise applications like mass face recognition (with some exceptions for law enforcement and military applications) and behavioural manipulation) being banned completely. Other kind of low level risk technology, even if free from any kind of authorization mechanism, will be forced to be transparent and communicate to the end user that they are dealing with a service provided by an AI powered system. The Eu is trying to be the first economic bloc to regulate this market, in hope to set the standards world wide in terms of AI security, as they did in the past with the adoption of the GDPR.

🌳 A Greener Europe

Further progress in the achievement of the green new deal agenda was concluded, with Parliament and Council reaching a provisional agreement on The EcoDesign Regulation, that aims to enshrine the concept of green products in the European market, expanding the scope of a previous regulation that mandate minimum standards only for energy consumption (the familiar Energy Label on most refrigerators), to other categories like durability, reparability, or the possibility to recycle it. The new bill also extend the number of products that must comply to the new standards, leaving out only motor vehicles that are already covered by other legislative act. The law now must win a formal majority in parliament and in the council, but with the current agreement, this is likely to happen.in addition to that, the council adopted its position to negotiate a bill concerning the deployment of net-zero technology, giving a formal start to the negotiations process.

🔨 Other Business

Finally I want point out 2 minor event that took place:First of all the adoption by the Council of a position regarding a new law that would pave the way for an harmonization of the rules on Criminal Proceeding Transfer between member states, that will improve greatly the judicial cooperation, and the fairness of this kind of process

Secondly a bilateral meeting between China and the Eu took place in Beijing on the 7th of December that highlighted the tense situation that we are living thru.

Next week appointments

Next week will be filled with activity, let’s do a rapid review of what appointment not to miss.

First of all the General Affair Council meeting that will be held on the 12th in which the final preparations for the upcoming European Council will be completed, along side the discussion by the Spain presidency of their request to include Catalan, Basque and Galician in the EU’s language regime, with the real possibility of seeing a vote on the matter.

On the 13th a meeting with the west Balkans country will be held in Brussels, as a continuation, of the Tirana summit, to discuss the accession path, into the Eu, for these countries,

Finaly the week will end with the 14th and 15th European Council, where the leaders of the various Eu member states will discuss about enlargement strategies, as well as confronting on matter of security and defence, taking stocks of the progress made up to this point in implementing the Common Security and Defence Policy, as well as discussing the current geopolitical situation in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Under the lens

Welcome to “under the lens”, the new section where we dive into specific bills, to see what they are about.

AI Act

Let’s start this deep dive by correcting a lie from the previous section: this isn’t the first law in the field of AI, as a set of rules released in China this August on generative AI precede it, but it is indeed the first legislation of its kind, as it is the first to identify in some potential use of AI, systematic threat to democratic values, and as such the first to ban outright some applications, as they pose an “unacceptable risk”.

Let’s begin from the basic: the law envision a risk based approach to regulation, with higher risk AI having to meet stricter rules. The first category is the *minimal risk* one that includes the vast majority of AI systems like AI powered spam detector or recommender systems. The system within this category will enjoy a free-pass, with no new rule applying to them, as they pose a 0 risk to public safety and individual rights.

Then we have *high risk* systems that include AI employed in critical infrastructure, to recruit people or used in medical devises. In addition to that, also biometric identification, and emotional recognitions systems falls under this category. AI in this risk tier will have to comply with strict requirements in term of risk-mitigation systems, high quality of data sets, detailed documentation, human oversight and a high level of robustness, accuracy and cyber security.

Another category is the one classified as *specific transparency risk* and it includes system were the end-user should be informed to be dealing with a machine, like chatbots. Furthermore, this category includes AI generated content and deep fakes that will have to be flagged as such. In addition provides will have to design systems in a way that synthetic and altered content is marked in a machine readable format, and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated.

Finaly the most important category is the *unacceptable risk* one, that contains all those AI considered to be a fundamental threat to personal rights, and that as such should be banned. This category includes systems like:

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• - biometric categorisation systems that use sensitive characteristics (e.g. political, religious, philosophical beliefs, sexual orientation, race)
• - untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases
• - emotion recognition in the workplace and educational institutions
• - social scoring based on social behaviour or personal characteristics
• - AI systems that manipulate human behaviour to circumvent their free will
• - AI used to exploit the vulnerabilities of people (due to their age, disability, social or economic situation)

This kind of application will be completely banned, with some exception, requested by member state’s representatives, for law enforcement purposes as well as military ones. For what concerns law enforcement, we know that Post – Remote biometric identification cold be used to targeted search of person convicted of a serious crime, after judiciary approval, while real time biometric identification will again be permitted only after judicial authorization, in a limited time and location, for the targeted search of a victim of abduction, trafficking or sexual exploitation, to prevent a specific terrorist threat or to identify a person suspected to have committed specific crimes mentioned in the regulation (terrorism, trafficking, sexual exploitation, murder, kidnapping, rape, armed robbery, participation in a criminal organisation, environmental crime (about this, I’m interested to read the final text that isn’t out yet, cause the old council position was open to be emendable by the council itself with no parliamentary participation (still by actiong at unanimity) and by the single member state, provided that the crime does imply at least 5 years of prison as maximum penalty))

The provision then specify that the ban will take effect after 6 month from the entry into force of the law, the provision regarding transparency after 1 year and the rest after 2 years.

To avoid to kill innovation the new legislation envision also a set of less stricter rules for general purpose AI that will enable their development, even if they could be used for potentially high – risk applications, with the commission, under the newly created AI office, formed by independent experts , oversighting their work and with the obligation to commit to high standard of transparency and security before commercialise foundational models. Additionally, the regulation offers the creation of AI regulatory sandboxes to help SME to build, train and develop safer AI thanks to the use of high standard dataset for training.

Finally the text sets out a series of enforcement mechanisms, based on a Federal enforcement approach, that can range from the exclusion of the AI from the internal market, to fines that can go up to the 7% of a company worldwide annual turnover.

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Note:
This is a passion project that was started when I struggled to find a good recap of the important event that did happen in the eu in the past week. It is an experiment and might or might not continue in the future. I hope you will enjoy it. I'm open to suggestion to improve this as much as possible

Also I wanna give an huge shout out to u/Pyrrus_1 for creating, out of his kindness, this amazing banner. I cannot stress enough how glad I am he decided to spend his time doing this for me, so once again, thank you.
Also his art is amazing, and you should check it out ^^

https://preview.redd.it/7genebgpag5c1.png?width=1099&format=png&auto=webp&s=af673809e9e7c50296a71cca85b18fed2d29408c

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