Europe is still in thrall to the analogue mindset

By Wolfgang Münchau, Financial Times

The dominant sentiment in modern-day Europe is anxiety. Its defining need is protection. And the defining feature of its collective mindset is complacency.

In the European Commission’s white paper on artificial intelligence all three come together in an almost comical manner: the fear of a high-tech digital future; the need to protect oneself against it; and the complacency inherent in the belief that regulation is the solution. Fear and complacency also pervade the EU’s foreign policy and security strategy, which seems to be critically contingent on Donald Trump not being re-elected US president.

I was not surprised to find that the EU’s AI white paper was focused mostly on regulation. What I found shocking, however, is how the commission underplays the extent to which the US and China are dominating the market. The EU is using data from 2016, but the gap has increased dramatically since. Stanford University’s AI index report shows that the US and China account for almost all global AI investment. The only two other countries with meaningful investments in the technology are the UK and Israel.

Guntram Wolff, director of the Bruegel think-tank in Brussels, notes that the US and China together account for 85 per cent of AI patent filings. The EU is simply not a player in this field. Any intelligent strategy would need to start from realisation of this fact, and not waffle on about “ecosystems of trust”.

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