European Union

Britain has announced it will seek harsher sentences for migrants caught entering the country without permission amid a record-breaking surge in arrivals over the English Channel.

European Union targets to boost biofuel use are likely to have led to the deforestation of an area roughly the size of the Netherlands over the last decade to expand soy, palm and other oil crops, a report said on Monday (5 July).

Italian police said on Saturday (3 July) they had broken up a number of online schemes offering to sell fake European Union digital COVID-19 status certificates or purported coronavirus vaccines.

Belarus' leader Alexander Lukashenko on Friday (2 July) ordered the closure of the border with Ukraine, seeking to block what he called an inflow of weapons to coup-plotters detected by his security services, BelTA state news agency reported.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Friday (2 July) pledged support for Lithuania, which is experiencing a quickly growing flow of Middle East migrants though its 679-kilometre border with Belarus.

Written by Klemen Žumer and Yann-Sven Rittelmeyer.

Since 1991 the Republic of Slovenia has had a parliamentary system composed of the Državni zbor (National Assembly) and the Državni svet (National Council). The Slovenian Parliament has the features of an ‘incomplete bicameral system‘, based on ‘asymmetric duality‘ – the National Council has less authority and fewer competences than the National Assembly, in accordance with Chapter IV of the Constitution.

The National Assembly is described as the ‘supreme representative and legislative institution, exercising legislative and electoral powers as well as control over the Executive‘. Its members are elected every four years from nine constituencies by a universal, equal, direct, and secret vote. Different, specific, rules apply to the election of one member each of the Italian and Hungarian national communities. The Government of Slovenia is accountable to the National Assembly, and the Prime Minister is elected by the National Assembly by a majority vote of all of its members.

The National Council is the representative body for social, economic, professional, and local interests and has mainly a consultative role. According to Article 96 of the Constitution, it is composed of a fixed number of representatives of labour and social interests (employers, employees, farmers, crafts and trades, independent professions and non-commercial fields) and representatives of local interests (territorial interests). The members do not hold office professionally and are elected for a five-year term from the relevant interest organisations or local communities. Political parties are not specifically represented in the National Council but it is not entirely free of political influence, especially when it comes to members representing local interests.

The National Assembly is the sole body that can adopt laws, under a legislative procedure governed by the Constitution and the Rules of Procedure of the National Assembly. Legislative proposals may be initiated by the Government, any Assembly member, a minimum of 5 000 voters (Article 88 of the Constitution), or by the National Council (Article 97). Whereas the National Assembly is in charge of adopting the laws, the primary role of the National Council is to convey its opinion and it has a ‘suspensive veto’ that allows to ask the National Assembly to examine a law once more, within seven days of its adoption and before its promulgation. Like the National Assembly, the National Council can also demand inquiries on matters of public importance, when this is requested by a third of its members (Article 93).

Read this complete briefing on ‘The Slovenian Parliament and EU affairs‘ in the Think Tank pages of the European Parliament.

In the framework of the LIFE TACKLE project, we are not only looking at professionals in the sporting sector (stadium managers, footballers, team owners, etc) but also at those who breathe so much life into football: the fans. FIGC, the...

Far-right parties from 16 EU countries, including Frances’ Rassemblement National, Poland’s PiS,  Hungary’s Fidesz and Italy’s Lega, have united on Friday (2 July), with the declared objective of making their voice heard in the context of the debate on the...

The paradox of Angela Merkel is that while it is hard to imagine the last twenty years of European politics without her, it is equally tough to think of her legacy as anything other than a manager.

Welcome to EURACTIV’s AgriFood Brief, your weekly update on all things Agriculture & Food in the EU. You can subscribe here if you haven’t done so yet. This week: EURACTIV brings you up to speed with all the developments on the long...

A rift between Brussels and Ljubljana marred the start of the Slovenian presidency of the EU Council - with host prime minister Janez Janša publicly rebuking Brussels that "smaller countries in the EU are treated as second-class".

Welcome to EURACTIV’s Global Europe Brief, your weekly update on the EU from a global perspective. You can subscribe here. /// The Eastern Partnership (EaP) is a carefully crafted political format meant to boost ties between the EU and its ex-Soviet...

The German hydrogen strategy, which inspired the EU's own hydrogen roadmap, has come under fire domestically for placing too much emphasis on “green” hydrogen and endangering the country's industrial decarbonisation process.

A binding global treaty is needed to phase out the production of “virgin” or new plastic by 2040, scientists have said. EURACTIV's media partner, The Guardian, reports.

Written by Philip Boucher.

When we talk about artificial intelligence (AI), we often use metaphors. Even the term ‘AI’ relies upon a metaphor for the human quality of intelligence, and its development is regularly described as a ‘race’. While metaphors are useful in highlighting some features of their subject, they can be so powerful that it becomes difficult to imagine or discuss their subject in other terms. Here, we examine some challenges presented by the central metaphor of ‘intelligence’, and whether metaphors for AI and its development emphasise competition at the cost of cooperation. Perhaps new metaphors could help us to articulate ambitious visions for AI, and new criteria for success.

Metaphors play a remarkable role in human history. They provide useful shortcuts to help us understand complex concepts, as well as powerful images of the world and how it could or should be in future. Whether unintentionally framing subjects or deliberately mobilising arguments, metaphors open some ways of thinking while closing others down. So, while they are an integral part of language and communication, specific choices of metaphors are worth reflection and care in how they are used.

AI is an umbrella term which refers to a wide range of technologies. It includes ‘expert systems’ – whereby humans encode their own knowledge and experience into rules – as well as ‘machine learning’ systems that identify patterns in data to generate rules by themselves. Discussions of AI are replete with metaphors for both the technology and its development.

Potential impacts and developments

The choice of the term ‘intelligence’ is a legacy of early scholarship and ambitions in the discipline. However, it poses some enduring difficulties for the definition of the technology. First, since human intelligence is itself a subjective and contested concept, the concept of AI is also destined for constant debate and reinterpretation. Second, by defining AI with reference to how we evaluate its apparent performance (intelligence), rather than by what it does (applications) or how it does it (techniques), AI can refer to almost any technology – from thermostats to ‘terminators’ – whether they exist or not. And third, since the various AI applications have such a diverse range of impacts, using the same word to refer to all of them can amplify the appearance of disagreements and make debates less productive. Technologists have long recognised these limitations, and tend to prefer more precise alternatives such as ‘machine learning’ or, simply, ‘statistics’. Nonetheless, AI retains its usage in public and policy settings.

Metaphors have linked minds and machines for centuries. From hydraulics to telegraphs and computers, we have conceptualised the brain with reference to the key technologies of our times. Today, we also reverse these metaphors to explain technologies in terms of human functions. For example, ‘artificial neural networks‘ (ANNs) invoke the neural networks in our brains. The metaphors of machine ‘vision’, ‘learning’, ‘recognition’, and ‘understanding’ suggest that machines fulfil the same functions as humans, in the same kind of way. While this is misleading, the comparison is so well established that, since the Turing test, AI advancement has been continually measured and evaluated against human performance of the same tasks. Contemporary assessments and ambitions for AI tend to focus on trustworthiness and trust which, as metaphors for the qualities of the AI and our relationship with it, can anthropomorphise the technology and divert accountability from those responsible for its use when something goes wrong.

Neuroscientists are concerned that metaphors reduce our brains to the status of computers, and make it difficult to imagine other – perhaps better – conceptualisations of what a technology does, and how. Likewise, metaphoric thinking elevates our software to the status of our minds. This poses several risks for AI development. First, it might tempt us to over-estimate the capabilities of AI tools and entrust them with tasks that they are not competent to perform. Indeed, this is the danger at the heart of many of the highest-risk AI applications. Second, when something goes wrong, we might be tempted, as alluded to above, to assign fault to the machine itself, rather than the people and organisations that inappropriately delegate tasks to them. Third, and perhaps most importantly, by reinforcing the idea of equivalence between what humans and computers do and how they do them, we position them in competition to perform the same kinds of tasks, rather than in cooperation to perform complementary tasks. The engrained language of AI as doing things ‘like humans’ imposes a potent conceptualisation for our future relationship with machines. It shapes how we articulate our ambitions, prioritise our development paths, and evaluate our progress.

We also find several powerful metaphors in debates about the international dimensions of AI development. Perhaps the most prominent is that of the ‘global AI race‘, often positioning the EU as struggling for a bronze medal behind the USA and China. This provides an intuitive framing for AI development at global scale. However, a race implies a single ‘finish line’, which fails to capture that AI is a range of technologies and applications used by actors with different strengths, priorities and values. In turn, a single ‘finish line’ implies a single ‘winner’ of a zero sum game in which those that did not win must have lost. In doing so, the race metaphor emphasises competition over cooperation, sharing and mutual benefits. It may compel us to follow the direction and pace of those we consider to be in front, rather than following our own path. A more specific version of this metaphor invokes an ‘AI arms race‘, a framing which has been criticised for closing down debate and transforming investments in militarised AI from options into necessities.

Finally, metaphors are also used to refer to positions in the AI debate. For example, the ‘terminator’ metaphor often serves to frame concerns about AI development as unjustified fears of fictional technologies that reveal a misunderstanding of its capabilities. However, studies of Europeans’ attitudes towards robotics and AI show that citizens overwhelmingly associate robots with production-line machines, and not humanoid forms like the terminator. Indeed, respondents were broadly supportive of AI while expressing some concrete concerns about today’s applications, notably their impacts on employment. While the terminator metaphor misrepresents how people make sense of AI, it serves as a powerful metaphor for public perspectives that may undermine questions about the concrete impacts of today’s AI.

Anticipatory policy-making

The definition of AI as ‘systems that display intelligent behaviour’ – as used in the 2018 European Commission communication AI for Europe – would be too ambiguous for a legal text. Notably, the recent AI Act was more precise, defining AI not by apparent intelligence, but with reference to specific techniques such as machine learning, expert systems, and statistics. That such a diverse range of tools came to be bundled together in a ‘tech-specific’ legislative proposal is testament to the power of the AI metaphor in policy.

In debates about AI, we could follow the approach of many developers in referring to specific techniques and application contexts. For example, if we target messages towards ‘machine learning diagnostic support’ or ‘biometric identification in public spaces’ rather than just ‘AI’, we might reveal more common ground between our positions. Furthermore, by reducing our reliance on core metaphors such as ‘intelligence’ and ‘trust’, which allude to human qualities and capabilities, we could create space for new metaphors that describe AI in its own terms. In doing so, we would be better placed to articulate visions for the future and benchmarks for success, which focus on complementing rather than competing with humanity. Likewise, when talking about competition in global AI development, we could move on from the ‘race’ metaphor to speak of an ‘AI Olympics’ which celebrates a plurality of global achievements, or of ‘moonshots’ that invoke the Apollo project to inspire grand ambitions for the benefit of all humanity. While still capturing the notion of competition in global development, they would articulate a role for cooperation, sharing and mutual benefits. Ultimately, whichever metaphors we use, it is important that they articulate agency for Europe to define the direction and pace of its development, and the criteria for evaluating its success.

Read the complete briefing on ‘What if we chose new metaphors for artificial intelligence?‘ in the Think Tank pages of the European Parliament.

Listen to policy podcast ‘What if we chose new metaphors for artificial intelligence?’ on YouTube.

Germany's data protection authorities have welcomed a ruling by the EU Court of Justice that gives national authorities more leeway in taking action against online platforms data branches under urgency provisions of the EU data protection framework. EURACTIV Germany reports.

The rights of LGBTIQ people in Hungary, the Slovenian presidency’s priorities and rule of law are some of the topics on Parliament’s agenda at the 5-8 July plenary session.

Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

The rights of LGBTIQ people in Hungary, the Slovenian presidency’s priorities and rule of law are some of the topics on Parliament’s agenda at the 5-8 July plenary session.

Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

Welcome to EURACTIV’s Digital Brief, your weekly update on all things digital in the EU. You can subscribe to the newsletter here.    “We are talking here about a fundamental right of EU citizens that we have a duty to protect. This...

Generation Z - those born between 1997 and 2015 - is faced with the future farming paradox: it is an exciting time to be a farmer with many opportunities opened up by innovation, but a farmer's life has never been so complicated.