Startup demands rules for artificial intelligence
When we use our cellphones every day, we are accompanied in the background by assistance systems such as auto-correction and suggested words based on artificial intelligence. This type of intelligence, also known as AI for short, learns fundamentally by recognizing independent patterns from data. From these patterns, the AI then derives customized advertising or news offers, this technology is also called profiling.
Salzburg company develops sales software
The sales software of the Salzburg start-up Fact AI does nothing else in the sign. The aim is to find tailor-made offers for customers who want to buy new skis, for example. Nevertheless, the entrepreneurs deal intensively and critically with the questions and disadvantages of artificial intelligence. “Our business field is a very sensitive area, where we have to make sure that we get the right balance between meaningful results for the company and at the same time not wanting or being able to manipulate people,” says Fact AI Managing Director Emanuel Schattauer.
Greatest danger: “No autonomous decision possible”
Because during profiling, the AI gets to know our tastes and can thus also influence our next choice. In the American election campaign, for example, Russia is said to have used artificial intelligence to influence the election in favor of Donald Trump. The technology therefore has potential for abuse: “The biggest risk factor that I see right now is that humans curtail people’s autonomy. When artificial intelligence is so advanced that it can guide people’s decisions, we lose the ability to intervene and stop them,” says Schattauer.
Startup demands rules for artificial intelligence
EU is working on a regulation on artificial intelligence
To prevent this from happening, the company is asking politicians to intervene to regulate it. According to the State Secretary for Digitization, Florian Tursky (ÖVP), the European Union is currently in a process to regulate artificial intelligence.
“Where we say very clearly, these are things that we want to use and on the other hand there are things that we do not want to make possible in Europe. There are areas that we don’t want with artificial intelligence – it must never happen that a computer decides about life and death or artificial intelligence must not decide whether a person still gets an insurance contract or not. That’s why we have to regulate,” says Tursky, State Secretary for Digitization. However, this European regulation has not yet been decided and the door to abuse is wide open.