AI in de politiek: zorg­wek­ken­de plannen in het nieuwe re­geer­ak­koord

Welcome to our  three-part series on AI-surveillance. In this episode: what is the new Belgian government planning to do with AI? Three things: AI surveillance, war and slashing government budgets.

Number one: AI surveillance. 

The Belgian government intends to set up ‘testing grounds’ for new technologies like facial recognition. That means your neighbourhood will have more digital patrols. Don’t you just love being watched by digital patrols in testing grounds when you leave your house in the morning?

Question is: how do they decide which neighbourhood needs to be patrolled more? 

Seriously though, like we said before, there is absolutely no evidence that AI cameras and AI surveillance helps to keep us safer. But there is plenty of evidence that shows that this technology leads to more racism and discrimination. One reason is that the AI has a bias. For example, facial recognition AI is less accurate with people of colour. That leads to innocent people being targeted by police, which can be deadly. The second reason is that they always target neighbourhoods with more marginalised people.

Number 2: War

Belgium is enthusiastically following the pro-war discourse popular with governments at the moment. They want to invest in electronic warfare and AI to protect Belgium against digital threats, and also to be able to carry out offensive operations. For this they will create ‘cybertroops’.

Number three: slashing the budgets. 

The government wants to use AI to do ‘spending reviews’, which means they will use AI to see if they can cut more costs somewhere. This doesn’t sound too bad. Cutting costs is good, right? But efficiency usually means people get fired, which leaves more work for the rest. Also, letting AI decide for example on whether you get your child benefits is pretty risky. In the Netherlands the Dutch government had to resign because it turned out they used AI that denied people child benefits just because they had a name that wasn’t Dutch enough. So even here there is a risk of discrimination, and we hope that the government focuses not only on saving money but also on doing what it’s supposed to do: helping people. 

Tune in for more about AI & racism by checking our extensive research on kifkif.be or follow our social media channels.