The European Evangelical Alliance is a pan-European movement serving the estimated 23 Million Evangelical Christians across the continent. In collaboration with an interdisciplinary group of experts in the field, we have studied the EU Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI and Policy Recommendations. The guidelines address many valuable points we fully support. In addition to these points, however, we would like to raise the following concerns:

•         Societal Engagement: Any technology which has the potential to significantly impact on our society (both for good and for bad) demands a broad and permanent well-informed dialogue in society itself to establish legitimacy before deployment of applications that could cause harm to individuals and wider society.

•         Protecting from harms to humanity: AI used for convenience, efficiency and speed in automated or semi-automated decision-making and for managing information could cause fundamental skills necessary for self-determination (such as critical thinking and analytical questioning) to diminish. This would have a serious impact on people’s ability to make decisions (both ethical and moral). Other AI applications also pose risks to a number of other aspects of what it means to be a human being such as moral autonomy, relationships and freedom of choice. We want to ensure that AI is developed to enhance rather than to diminish our skills for decision-making and scope for self-determination in a digital age.

•         Responsible, accountable AI requires oversight which is consistent and legally enforceable internationally: We believe that humanity will only be protected from harm in certain potential use areas of AI if appropriate legislation, regulation and human oversight measures are put in place. We would like to see this area developed more thoroughly in the context of the specific harms outlined both by the EU High Level Expert Group on AI (HLEG) in its Guidelines, Policy Recommendations, and in this document.

We explain these concerns in a bit more detail in the letter attached.

eea_contribution_to_eu_hleg_on_ai_-_november_2019.pdf