Intelligent machines. The first cross-cutting topic that we consider is the single broad category of ‘intelligent machines’. We have framed the topic in this way because we are not convinced that it is possible to sustain the distinctions between ‘robots’ and ‘non-robots’ on the one hand, and virtuality and materiality on the other hand.
Intelligent machines. Many participants in the Human Brain Project use a restrictive definition of Artificial Intelligence and argue that the Project has nothing to do with Artificial Intelligence. However, in the report, WP12.1 found that the forums and initiatives aimed at thinking through its potential beneficial and detrimental developments for society usually adopt a broader understanding of the term. For these reasons, the Foresight Lab recommends that the Human Brain Project must recognize that a number of subprojects across the Project will collectively contribute to the broader field of machine intelligence, and act upon it. Hence WP12.1 recommends that the decision makers and researchers work closely with the Social and Ethical Division, and with others outside the HBP, to engage with current debates around how to make Artificial Intelligence ethical and socially beneficial and bring the weight of publicly-funded, open research to bear on them. On the basis of the Foresight work in this area, WP12.1 identified a number of key questions, some of them near-term concerns, of relevance to the potential outcomes of the Human Brain Project. Among the most important were: the need to consider how to regulate and control increasingly powerful and sophisticated data processing across borders where different laws might apply; the need to protect user privacy from predictive algorithms and ensure informed consent of data processing; and the question of whether society will benefit from the increased efficiency of intelligent machines or wealth will be increasingly concentrated in the hands of few individuals. These and related questions are especially important as the Human Brain Project, one of the two Future and Emerging Technology Flagships of the European Union, enters Horizon 2020, the funding programme that will implement the Innovation Union, which outcomes are notably expected to position Europe as a world-class competitor in ICT research and digital innovation, through ‘open science’ and the development of innovative public- private partnerships. The report also considered issues of human-machine integration, emphasising the need to bring humans firmly into the ICT picture and focusing on some of the relationships (already existing or expected) between the human and the machine, keeping in mind that in the context of the Human Brain Project, this means not just computer scientists and engineers but also neuroscientists, clinicians and patient, and eventually a wide arra...
