G7 Summit: the global digital industry urges leaders to align digital policies

In the run-up to the G7 Summit scheduled on August 24-26, DIGITALEUROPE has led a strategic coalition of top organisations representing the industry of G7 countries. Read their recommendations on digital policies alignment outlining the three main opportunities of policy coordination: AI, cybersecurity and data flows.

Trust and human-centric AI

Trust enables free flows of data and drives growth. This is the rationale behind Japan Prime Minister Abe’s concept of ‘Data Free Flow with Trust’, or DFFT.

“Trust and data flows go hand in hand, and we urge governments to identify and share experiences on regulatory mechanisms that allow data to flow while ensuring trust”, said Cecilia Bonefeld-Dahl, Director General, DIGITALEUROPE. “We have developed five concrete recommendations to support them, including citizens protection and common cyber standards, and we are ready to provide assistance along the way”, Ms Bonefeld-Dahl went on to say.

Fostered by DFFT, technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) are powering the digital transformation of society. Governments have to find innovative ways to ensure that this uninterrupted change will serve the interest of common good. To this effect, the OECD, the EU, the governments of Canada and Japan and many others have worked hard to outline ethical guidelines and human-centric principles for AI. As an example, the EU has developed an agile ‘policy sandboxing’ process allowing businesses to ‘test’ the principles for ethical AI using a comprehensive, detailed assessment list in the AI development phase.

“The EU’s efforts to put all AI policies through a multi-stakeholder agile reality check and drive fact-based policy making is good news. In a rapidly changing digital era, where few policy makers have deep insight, we cannot allow policies that are not validated in the real world; it will slow down the progress of crucial innovations and growth”, Cecilia Bonefeld-Dahl said. “Having played an active part in the dedicated High Level Expert Group set up by the European Commission”, Ms Bonefeld-Dahl went on to say, “I encourage governments to join the abovementioned process and to take steps to enable AI innovation and data use so that governments, business, academics and civil society can test these principles in the context of actual AI development and use.”

Governments committed to delivering trustworthy and human-centric AI should give serious consideration to the four recommendations we have spelt out in this respect, ranging from ethical design to industry-led, fully interoperable and internationally recognized standards, and cooperative Research and Innovation.