BRUSSELS, Oct 8 (Reuters) - The European Commission on Wednesday announced a 1-billion-euro ($1.1 billion) plan to ramp up the use of artificial intelligence in key industries amid a push to cut the European Union’s reliance on U.S. and Chinese technologies. The EU executive’s Apply AI strategy followed an action plan unveiled in April which seeks to lighten the regulatory burden and costs for startups struggling to comply with landmark AI rules which entered into force in August last year.
The move also underscores Europe’s goal of achieving strategic autonomy in key sectors amid trade tensions with the United States and China and the dominance of U.S. Big Tech. “I want the future of AI to be made in Europe,” Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement. “AI adoption needs to be widespread, and with these strategies, we will help speed up the process. We will drive this ‘AI first’ mindset across all our key sectors, from robotics to healthcare, energy and automotive,” she said. The Commission singled out healthcare, pharmaceuticals, energy, mobility, manufacturing, construction, agri-food, defence, communications and culture as critical sectors that should use more AI. Sector-specific measures under the Apply AI strategy include setting up a network of AI-powered advanced screening centres in healthcare and developing agentic AI in manufacturing, climate and pharmaceutical industries. The 1 billion euros will come from EU research projects such as Horizon Europe and the Digital Europe programme, which may encourage EU countries and the private sector to provide matching funds, the Commission said. ($1 = 0.8569 euros)
She might just be defined by her connections in her actions, the person not mattering. I’ve heard that this person is just not very bright in some things outside of the bulk of their experience and knowledge. In general might be true for politicians. Their stakeholders need to have perspective. They need to keep faces, show good sense of humor and negotiating talent, and don’t show what they think.
Not even totalitarianism, just power held by small elites, and this is a natural attraction for any human who got into rare places (also UvdL is notably a member of elites). See any sci-fi or fantasy universe, their plots often involve main characters and their small groups of acquaintances, traveling over all the world, solving millennium-old riddles, making color revolutions, and what not. All by a small group of heroes, all knowing each other. That’s just natural. Humans always strive to monopolize decision-making for their group, without outsiders.
So - that person might not even understand they are evil. Maybe they are not. At the same time it’s often really hard to tell which layer of a personality is the true one.
Long story short - yeah, I wouldn’t trust judgement of people like UvdL or maybe Kallas (elites too, just ex-Soviet), and I wouldn’t let them near power. But they themselves might not be malicious agents, just people thinking they are some sort of princess Leia in the New Republic, while the world is completely different and, notably, isn’t comprised of NPCs in a game.
As to the point - it’s a good technology to encourage critical thinking. It teaches you to trust nothing and nobody. The older generation, though, and even mine, show the opposite reaction, but anyone growing in a world where anything can be drawn believably by a computer will be used to think before believing.
It’s good long-term. Short-term it’s a catastrophe. They could use that investment for making a Xanadu-like EU-wide information system, plus cryptography as reinforcement, to counter the catastrophe, instead they are adding to it. Somehow with tech everyone tries to climb up and up faster, instead of fixing the foundations of towers they climb. Hypertext with reverse links and changes notification and global object identities and replication could solve so many flaws of WWW, that we wouldn’t need a lot of what’s been built on top of it.