A Romanian Member of the European Parliament (MEP) warned against the use of artificial intelligence to create social credit scores Tuesday, promising that the European Union would ban this dystopian horror.
MEP Dragoș Tudorache discussed upcoming European Union artificial intelligence regulations during a conversation with The Washington Post Live. During the March 12 interview, Tudorache told Cat Zakrzewski, host and Post national tech policy correspondent, that dangerous use of artificial intelligence such as “social scoring,” “predictive policing,” and facial recognition would be banned throughout the EU.
China’s social scoring, also known as social credit scores, is a plan to create public and private systems to surveil people and monitor them for law-breaking, spreading disinformation and other unapproved behaviors, among other restrictive orders. According to Business Insider, a social credit score could be lowered by something as miniscule as “buying too many video games.”
Tudorache told Zakrzewski that he would not allow this system in the European Union. “We have a list of prohibitions on the use of AI and some examples are social scoring… like what happens in China, which, we say, is so detrimental to how we understand the role and rights of citizens in a society that we don’t see that use of technology in the [European Union] and other similar applications such as emotional recognition such as predictive policing,” he said.
Tudorache called these uses of AI “incongruent” with EU values and said that the new regulations would put a “ban on their use on our market.”
The European Union Parliament passed the new regulations on March 13. In a press release summarizing the regulations, the European Union announced a prohibition of “social scoring based on social behavior or personal characteristics.” As suggested by Tudorache, the press release also mentioned a ban on “emotion recognition” AI in some contexts as well as a number of possible public surveillance uses.
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