Stuff I hear in the European Parliament but rarely in Silicon Valley

I work in the European Parliament with digital policy, which has lead me to hear some interesting claims about AI and other digital affairs. I am also fortunate to have a decent network in the bay area and the topics of conversations are very different.

Among techies, 5G is rarely the focal topic of discussion. Nobody is talking about all the new things that they can do once 5G is widely deployed. Nobody ever brings up their friend's new exciting start-up enabled by 5G infrastructure, like they do with AI.

What is 5G good for? I still haven't figured it out, and boy have I tried. Something about enabling collaboration between self-driving cars? Is it A bi-monthly curated box of snacks? Enabling a new wave applications previously infeasible, similar to when 3G was rolled out?

Unlike the techies I meet, parliamentarians love to talk about 5G. The first draft of the AI Committee's newest report includes multiple pages on 5G, stating:

AI will not, however, be functional without strong deployment of broadband, fibre, edge nodes and 5G, or if key emerging technologies such as quantum computing are not made a priority

5G alone is not enough, only when coupled with quantum computing on the edge will we be able to realize the full benefits of the AI revolution!

There is also much hype about a coming wave of edge-computing which will enable decentralized computing and preserve your privacy.

I still haven't really heard a clear definition of edge computing. The canonical examples I've heard, haven't been particularly convincing. On the edge your IoT-enabled temperature sensing factory will not need to connect to a cloud, because it can locally calculate the relevant equations itself. But what's the advantage of that?

I think there are many examples where for security, latency, or lack of reliable internet access we may want to locally compute things, but since when did we start calling that *edge-computing* and implying it is going to revolutionize the digital revolution? Whenever the discussion falls on edge-computing I know it's only a short matter of time before blockchain is brought up and I find an excuse to leave.

The report likewise places a large emphasis on dataspaces. What on earth is a dataspace? How does one build one and what value does one provide?

Nevertheless it seems to be really important if Europe is to ever catch up to the US and China and avoid the ‘existential threat to our democracy’ (These are the actual words used by the report) of not fully realizing our AI potential.

Negotiating amendments to insane paragraphs like these is a tedious process. If you suggest deleting or modifying some outrageous claim over 5G quantum computing, you can be sure that a political opponent will grab the opportunity to paint you as an ignorant luddite scared of new technology.

Appealing to expertise is not going to do you any good either. There are a dozen organisations all interested in winning lucrative infrastructure contracts with armies of highly paid, highly credentialed experts whose job is to make the consensus seem to be that whichever technology their company has a vested interest in is absolutely crucial for Europe not to fall behind China.

I see politicians with non-technical backgrounds doing their best to make sense of a rapidly changing and increasingly digital world. Figuring out the real trends from lobbyist nonsense is already difficult, but opposing the lobbyists is civil society and a hundred academics, recently turned AI ethicists, pointing out a hundred ways big tech and AI are causing harm. Many of these harms are incredibly worrying, but just as many are poorly documented and grossly exaggerated. I don't envy the politicians who on any given week hear everything from:

If Europe doesn't stop over-regulating tech companies, it will become a shadow of its former self

to

if we don't start regulating big tech soon, our loved ones will fall prey to predatory algorithms that are causing teenagers to commit suicide in record high rates.

and have to figure out which narrative to believe. Under these conditions it's no surprise that the regulation we get manages to not only be overburdensome, but also fails to resolve many of the issues they set out to solve. Despite GDPR I still have no expectations of my privacy being preserved!

Many in silicon valley paint a picture of clueless policy makers standing in the way of techies trying to innovate. This is correct, but the picture fails to appreciate why policy makers are addressing these issues in the first place. Leaders of the big technology companies have time and time again failed to act ethically. Google removed "don't be evil" from their code of conduct for crying out loud! Stop conspiring to create monopolies at every chance you get, and regulators wouldn't feel the need to intervene so damn often.

One thing is clear: Parliaments are struggling to keep pace with a rapid technological change.