Article  17 of the  Treaty on the  Functioning of the  EU provides alegal foundation  for dialogue between EU institutions  and religious associations, churches and  non-confessional organizations. Seminars, conferences and high-level meetings  have been organized on the basis of this article to discuss and examine  highly significant issues. One of these conferences was organised by the European  Parliament on 19 March 2019 about Artificial Intelligence ( AI ), where the evolution  of AI, its possible advantages, and the legal and ethical implications, were discussed. In this  meeting, the European Parliament hosted diverse participants, from religious associations to scientists, from  politicians to academics, who assisted in examining this crucial issue comprehensively.

Artificial  Intelligence  as a field of  computer science,  has played a strategic  role in shaping our future,  in relation to smart machines; robots   have ability to think and the ability to  respond with certain human-like behaviour . The   idea is to make people’s lives much easier, as  advocates of AI were highlighting during the debates  in the conference. This includes remarkable instances of  solving complicated problems, AIs effectiveness on medical diagnostics, right  decision making capability and so on.

Evanescing of values
Besides  all these  advantages, the  ethical and legal  implications of AI  systems formed the major  part of the debates in the  conference, where the speakers drew attention  to the possible challenges, such as the evanescing of values.  For example, AI  has the potential  to challenge traditional  notions of legal responsibility,  because the current legal framework  has some shortcomings in respect of the  liability and transparency of AI with non-binding  rules. Who will be responsible or who will be fined  in the case of a robot’s harmful behavior? Additionally, some  speakers were focusing on ethical challenges of AI systems; how they can  pose an enormous threat for human dignity in the case of reckless and unregulated  manufacturing. Examples given to illustrate this were of the disappearance of manufacturing jobs, the  posing of a risk to democracy with election hacking, the violation of privacy, the lack of empathy in case processing. all this can  be seen as a possible threat to human dignity.

To  conclude,   Artificial Intelligence  is a highly critical issue  which is a particular concern  for the fate of humanity. Therefore, governments, international  organizations, regional organizations etc. have to implement efficient  policies in this field to avoid any possible threats and to make sure they are  used in a salutary manner.

by Ismayil Targuluyev
ELP fellew