Rome to host international AI summit next year

Italy will host an international AI conference in Rome that will coincide with the nation’s G7 presidency, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announced following a decision made on the sidelines of the first-ever AI Safety summit in London.

Scholars, managers and experts worldwide are encouraged to participate and will have the opportunity to discuss methods, initiatives and guidelines to ensure that artificial intelligence (AI) assists rather than replaces workers to improve their conditions and prospects, Meloni added.

“Italy intends to place artificial intelligence, along with digital security, at the centre of the upcoming Italian G7 Presidency discussions. We will work on how to foster shared governance involving both the public and private sectors”, Meloni said.

Rome intends to develop “ethical guardrails”, meaning a set of ethical principles to be followed in the development and deployment of AI that can ensure a balance between technology and humans, “the centre of our society”.

One of the risks associated with AI is the idea that it will make more people in the labour market redundant, replacing them with newer, cheaper technologies.

“The development of artificial intelligence is the greatest intellectual, practical and anthropological challenge of this era. There is no doubt that the applications of this new technology can bring great opportunity in many fields but also enormous risks”, Meloni said.

“We are facing a new frontier of progress, which for the first time seriously risks undermining the very principle of the centrality of humanity”, she added.

In 2020, the Vatican already hosted the Rome Call for AI Ethics, which aimed to draw the boundaries of AI and gave rise to the concept of “algorethics”, which is the attempt to give ethics to algorithms.

Meloni announced that Italy is working toward completing the National Strategic Plan for AI and pledged to set up a specific fund to support Italian startups working in the field and work with the EU on approving the AI Act.

(Federica Pascale | Euractiv.it)