Macron Wants Europe to Forget Facebook Fears and Embrace A.I.

Macron Wants Europe to Forget Facebook Fears and Embrace A.I.
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Just as Facebook sparks outrage with reports about its data sharing practices, French president Emmanuel Macron wants Europeans to relax about the use of their information, according to Bloomberg.

He is ramping up French efforts in the race to deploy artificial intelligence and is being held back by Europe’s culture of privacy. Reports that Facebook saw some 50 million U.S. profiles fed into election-campaign algorithms in 2016 are unlikely to help him make his case.

And that’s a problem for researchers trying to push back the frontiers of artificial intelligence: massive amounts of data are the raw material that their super computers use to learn. Without it, European scientists are fighting their rivals in the U.S. and China with one hand tied behind their backs.

“Accessing data, that’s the number one challenge, the major hurdle,“ said Cedric Villani, an internationally-renowned mathematician whom Macron tapped to lead his tech push. Paris is gaining ground as a European hub for research and Villani aims to pull those strands together with his A.I. strategy. He says it will stress that people, companies and governments must share more data across Europe.

There are two main cultural barriers to greater sharing in Europe, he said: Europeans still see their markets are purely domestic; and data sharing is seen as giving up a competitive advantage. As a result, most of the traces individuals leave in various systems go untapped. They could help identify health risks or improve the traffic flow in cities but are either protected in silos or left in the hands of people without the skills to use them.

The old continent will take a small step into the future next month when its General Data Protection Regulation comes into force. Villani says the rules represent an improvement in the privacy rules, but much more needs to be done if the EU is to compete at the forefront of global technological development. He said if the rules are done correctly, data can and should be made anonymous and sharing can be done within a strict framework of privacy protection. But to ensure that happens, Europe may need to stay ahead of other jurisdictions that don’t have such concerns.