[...] Europe has just taken the lead in the hotly contested global debate on the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI). On Monday in Brussels, the EU Commission presented its Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI. The 52-member High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (HLEG AI), of which I am a member, worked on the text for nine months. The result is a compromise of which I am not proud, but which is nevertheless the best in the world on the subject. The United States and China have nothing comparable. [...]

The underlying guiding idea of a “trustworthy AI” is, first and foremost, conceptual nonsense. Machines are not trustworthy; only humans can be trustworthy (or untrustworthy). If, in the future, an untrustworthy corporation or government behaves unethically and possesses good, robust AI technology, this will enable more effective unethical behaviour. Hence the Trustworthy AI narrative is, in reality, about developing future markets and using ethics debates as elegant public decorations for a large-scale investment strategy. [...]

The guidelines are lukewarm, short-sighted and deliberately vague. They ignore long-term risks, gloss over difficult problems (“explainability”) with rhetoric, violate elementary principles of rationality and pretend to know things that nobody really knows. [...]

Given this situation, who could now develop ethically convincing "Red Lines" for AI? Realistically, it looks as if it can only be done by the new EU Commission that starts its work after the summer. Donald Trump's America is morally discredited to the bone; it has taken itself out of the game. And China? Just as in America, there are many clever and well-meaning people there, and with a view to AI security, it could, as a totalitarian state, enforce any directive bindingly. But it's already far ahead in the employment of AI-based mass surveillance on its 1.4 billion citizens; we cannot expect genuine ethics there. As “digital totalitarianism 2.0”, China is not an acceptable source for serious ethical discussions. Europe must now bear the burden of a real historical responsibility. [...]