FERMA provided feedback on 1 February to the Stakeholder Consultation on Draft AI Ethics Guidelines released on 18 December 2018 by the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence.

FERMA welcomes the proposed overall approach to establish the first European guidelines on AI ethics (i.e. voluntary and build on a set of existing fundamental values, rights and principles) and sees the draft as a starting point to efficiently manage the ethical challenges of AI.

FERMA recommends to clarify the definition of IA, which is a technology using a series of diverse techniques (statistics, algorithms, data processing…), and upon which rules are coded and programmed to learn without human intervention.

Such an approach would ensure that AI capabilities would be neither under- nor over- estimated.

FERMA also draws attention to the implications of AI for the ethical control over the insurance underwriting process and the opportunities and threats of AI technologies for the insurability of organisations.