The Chairman of the Special Committee on Artificial Intelligence in a Digital Age, Dragoș Tudorache, reacted on Thursday to the EU-US talks which took place in Pittsburgh.
“The technological partnership between the EU and the US, based on shared democratic values, is the most solid foundation of the transatlantic future” said Dragoș Tudorache (Renew, RO).
“I salute the establishment of the Trade and Technology Council, its first meeting today in Pittsburgh, and the Inaugural Joint Statement. The transatlantic relationship is the cornerstone of the modern world and of the rules-based international system. In the digital age, the relationship between the EU and the US will continue to have a significant influence on the way the international system evolves. We need to ensure, together, that it evolves in the right direction. And we need to realise the magnitude and importance of this joint responsibility” he said.
“We have a significant agenda. We need to work together for reliable and trustworthy AI; we need to ensure that our supply chains in critical technologies are not threatened by non-democracies and non-market economies and that foreign investments in our economies are not weakening us; we need to ensure that the EU and the US speak with a united voice on the world stage when setting the standards for the future digital world; and we need to ensure that technology is not misused in any way to subvert our values and our democracies”.
Democratic values should guide technological development
“Democracy and democratic values should guide technological development, and I am happy to note that they are the foundations of the TTC. It is only by aligning technology to serve our democracies that we can build a digital future without the proliferation of dangerous practices such as rights-violating systems of social scoring, misinformation, and coercion through technological dependence” he added.
“It is my strong belief that cooperation on the issues covered by the TTC will become the premier vector of stability and convergence across the Atlantic and will lead to a strengthened transatlantic relationship, despite some long-standing and some novel irritants between the EU and the US. For this reason, in the future, I would like to see the TTC, now operationalized at the executive level, complemented by a parliamentary dimension, in which the European Parliament and Congress engage in structured work on regulatory convergence, and by an investment dimension, in which the EU and the US jointly commit resources to moonshot technology projects and to maintaining our global innovation lead” he concluded.
Background
The Transatlantic Trade and Tech Council released an inaugural joint statement on Wednesday. The EU-US TTC is a new forum for transatlantic cooperation.
In December 2020, the European Commission proposed the creation of the EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC), to facilitate trade, expand investment, develop compatible standards, boost innovation and strengthen the partners’ technological and industrial leadership. The TTC also aims to ‘lead values-based digital transformation’. Meanwhile, trade between the EU and US continues and is as important as ever, manifested in the fact that, together, they form the largest bilateral economic relationship in the world, with the largest global data flows across the Atlantic.
Further information
- Special Committee on Artificial Intelligence in a Digital Age
- In a nutshell – EU-USA: a transatlantic technology alliance
- EP Research – Harnessing the new momentum in transatlantic relations: Potential areas for common action during the Biden presidency
- Factsheet – EU-US Trade and Technology Council