Our guests is Holger Hoos, co-founder of CLAIRE, the Confederation of Laboratories for Artificial Intelligence Research in​ Europe, and professor of Machine Learning at Leiden University. I had the pleasure of joining Holger at last week's event Vision for AI 2021 in response to the European Commission’s publishing their “European Approach to Artificial Intelligence”.  We’re chatting about the real back end of AI, its beginnings, why it’s so cool, where do we already encounter it in our everyday lives and what should Europe’s AI look like?

Why should I care about AI? What are the right reasons?

What would you have said to people 200 years ago on why should I care about electricity? Because it will change your life, work, everything, it will make things possible, it will make the world a better place, you can say the same about AI

It is a transformative technology. We have manoeuvred ourselves as humanity into a position where human intelligence is too limited for the mess we’ve made. We need more powerful tools than we’ve had in the past. Climate change and responsible and sustainable use of resources.

A lot of people’s views of AI has been formed by science fiction movies, in some cases, this is rather dystopian and in other cases, it’s an overly optimistic view. Destroy us or make paradise? What we’re really looking at is a foundational technology, computers taken to the next level.

Automative AI - bringing down the level of expertise needed to use AI. People become more productive and what they do becomes better than what they can do alone.

Why is it the most underappreciated area of AI? Examples of aeroplanes flying, computers enabling us to talk to each other via zoom, what is enabling us to do all this? Automative reasoning - the hardware on which all of this is running, (banks, medical equipment), all computer-controlled, and we trust the hardware.

Where should this not be used? If we were to date Mr Spock, we’d find that pure logic has limits. The same is for AI. Particularly when it comes to dealing with people, and all their limitations and bias.

Human-centred AI - AI build by people, for people, for the benefit of people. We have to compensate for some of our limitations, and automotive reasoning and deep learning does this well. It should do all of this in order to help us reach our goals, and this isn't something you can do as a second thought, it needs to be designed with this purpose.

European AI - do we go it alone? Does it make sense to do anything of global consequence alone? No, it doesn’t!

CLAIRE - why does it exist? Because AI is important for our future, and all the citizens of Europe and the world. The two superpowers, China and the US are making massive investments, and there is a real risk of losing talent to them and the edge that we could and should have in AI technology that is so transformative.

Is there such a thing as US AI or China AI or European AI? What are the differences? At a simplistic level, AI in China is government-driven, which is a great thing

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