President of France Emmanuel Macron Talks About Nation's New AI Strategy (wired.com)

Earlier this week, Emmanuel Macron, President of France, pledged to spend $1.9 billion over the next five years and allow expanded data-sharing to help make France a leader in artificial intelligence. In an interview with Wired, Emmanuel Macron, President of France, explained why he is making big investments to bring France into the "winner takes all" race with the U.S. and China on artificial intelligence. An interesting quote, "At some point, as citizens, people will say, 'I want to be sure that all of this personal data is not used against me, but used ethically, and that everything is monitored. I want to understand what is behind this algorithm that plays a role in my life." An excerpt from the story: AI will raise a lot of issues in ethics, in politics, it will question our democracy and our collective preferences. For instance, if you take healthcare: you can totally transform medical care making it much more predictive and personalized if you get access to a lot of data. We will open our data in France. I made this decision and announced it this afternoon. But the day you start dealing with privacy issues, the day you open this data and unveil personal information, you open a Pandora's Box, with potential use cases that will not be increasing the common good and improving the way to treat you.

In particular, it's creating a potential for all the players to select you. This can be a very profitable business model: this data can be used to better treat people, it can be used to monitor patients, but it can also be sold to an insurer that will have intelligence on you and your medical risks, and could get a lot of money out of this information. The day we start to make such business out of this data is when a huge opportunity becomes a huge risk. It could totally dismantle our national cohesion and the way we live together. This leads me to the conclusion that this huge technological revolution is in fact a political revolution.

Comments

Transparency

[AmiMoJo]

Alogrithmic transparency can only be a good thing. When AI makes a decision that affects you, you should have a right to understand how and why the decision was made, and to challenge it. That will prevent a lot of the problems we have already started to see with things like algorithmic sentencing of criminals.

Re:Transparency

[NettiWelho]

Alogrithmic transparency can only be a good thing. When AI makes a decision that affects you, you should have a right to understand how and why the decision was made, and to challenge it. That will prevent a lot of the problems we have already started to see with things like algorithmic sentencing of criminals.

Seeing the decision being made is not enough, data-input needs to be fully transparent as well.

Re: Transparency

[ArmoredDragon]

The French don't need to worry about this, because it happens every decade or so: France is always super pissed that it isn't the leader of anything anymore, so it plays a game of "Yeah? Well, I'll make a better one, and you'll get so jealous!"

During the previous decade, it was all about a search engine they called quaero, because they wanted to have a better Google than the USA. A few hundred million dollars later, nothing happened, just like what will happen here.

Really, France is putting under 2 billion dollars for this. The private sector in the USA alone already spends hundreds of billions on this. You'd figure that with as hard as France taxes its people, it might have a bit more money to spare.

France gets what it voted for

[guruevi]

Macron effectively said he is going to oppose the EU privacy framework in order to sell the data to the highest bidder under the guise of improving "AI", a system that thus far doesn't really exist, we've got some good classifiers but nothing remotely resembling intelligence.

Re:Nothing

[hey!]

You're just pissed because he's got a stronger asshole handshake than the Dear Leader.

April Fool's

[ebonum]

This year Slashdot is off to a strong start!