AI Law was at the heart of the 7th conference of the Lexing® network, which was held in Paris on June 14, 2018, at the invitation of Lexing Alain Bensoussan Lawyers.
This year, the 2018 conference brought together more than 200 people, including representatives from 25 countries belonging to the network, who attended a conference-debate on the theme “Artificial Intelligence and Law” in the magnificent building of the Collège des Bernardins.
The 2018 conference “Artificial intelligence and Law” brought together more than 200 people, including clients from the host country and representatives of 25 countries belonging to the network.
Autonomous cars, smart cities, smart contracts… Our daily life, at home and at work, is increasingly governed by algorithms.
How to regulate AI in the age of Big Data?
This is the question that the lawyers of the Lexing® network, as well as external stakeholders, tried to answer, offering an international overview of the legal rules applicable to AI.
Artificial Intelligence: The legal trends for the next 10 years
After a welcome address by Frédéric Forster, vice president of the Lexing Network, Alain Bensoussan, the network’s founding president, gave an overview of the legal trends in AI for the next 10 years. For him, it is obvious: we must code “ethics by design” and it is urgent to give a legal framework to algorithms and coders.
The first roundtables focused on addressing the various legal implications of the exponential growth of algorithms:
- “AI and data protection: with the participation of Andreas Lober (Germany), John Giles (South Africa), Jean-François Henrotte (Belgium) and Maria Ostashenko (Russia);
- “AI applied to connected and autonomous vehicles”: with Daniel Preiskel (United Kingdom) and Raffaele Zallone (Italy).
Two keynote presentations were then delivered: one by Marguerite Brac de La Perrière (France) on “AI in health and genetics industries”, and the other by Françoise Gilbert (United States) on “AI applied to smart cities”.
The first invited speaker was Laurent Midrier, from Bureau Veritas— and with whom the Alain Bensoussan Avocats law firm developed the world’s first data protection technical standard at the end of 2017 — who spoke on “AI and private certification”.
The conference continued with two roundtables: the first, led by Dudley Kneller (Australia) and Gabriel Lizama (Costa Rica) examined “AI in business: ethical and legal challenges“, while the second, led by Sébastien Fanti (Switzerland), Enrique Ochoa (Mexico), Ilanit Apelfeld and Mor Swiel (Israel) looked into “AI serving smart contracts“.
Emmanuel Walle (France) went on to discuss aspects related to the use of “AI in the area of Human Resources”.
A final panel of speakers focused on the particularly sensitive issues related to “AI serving security”: Franck Royanez (New Caledonia) spoke on predictive police, Yassine Younsi (Tunisia) on predictive justice and Didier Gazagne (France) gave interesting insights into some of the legal issues raised by security drones, using a few short videos.
In conclusion, Mr. Hubert Tardieu, CEO Advisor Atos, shared his thoughts on “How to find the right balance for AI between data protection and platform’s economy?”
To end with a futuristic note, the conference concluded with Alain Bensoussan offering us one of the first releases in public of Eva Lexing, his “new assistant”, a chatbot specialized in EU’s data protection regulation (GDPR).
What’s in store for next year?
The next conference of the Lexing® network will be held in Costa Rica in 2019. Stay tuned for more information!