Professor Richard Aldrich

Europe is far behind North America and Asia on AI. Its internal investment is a third of what is being spent in Asia and less than a quarter of that in North America. Yet the EU is a regulatory superpower and will have disproportionate effects on this market. Good global frameworks lower transaction costs and increase the possibility of trustworthy AI. In the past technical experts hailing from geopolitical rivals, readily collaborated on standards. Now governments are much less willing to collaborate on conventions as they play games of global cyber-power. The European Union’s AI regulatory regime is likely to be the most stringent and most comprehensive of the world’s major jurisdictions. It will have first mover advantage and will diffuse this globally, producing a so-called “Brussels Effect”. What will this look like? What are the opportunities for business? What are the problems? 

One of the most dramatic changes of recent times has been a decline of confidentiality, especially around business and government. Information is everywhere but secrecy is in short supply. While the ethical aspects of ‘whistle-blowing’ have received attention, few have attempted to explain the technical dynamics underpinning the growing climate of exposure. This has much to do with the changing structure of information and ‘big data’. Moreover, many tech providers are at best agnostic about ‘security’ and the Internet itself provides the perfect medium for the anonymous degradation of secrets. Because the main driver is technology, Richard Aldrich suggests this trend is likely to accelerate, presenting managers with one of their biggest future challenges. But what are the solutions? Paradoxically, in an era when the Internet seems ubiquitous, the top spies now look to a mixture of analogue and manual systems – this offers a solution – but at what cost? 

Governments frequently talk of ‘cyber-power’ and national strategy reviews use the word on almost every page. Yet most of our critical national infrastructure is in private hands and the last decade has seen marked differences between government and the private sector on many issues from privacy regulation to supply chains. The new ‘whole of society’ approach to cyber-power requires complex partnerships between government, major corporations, SMEs, universities and even citizens, but also offers remarkable new opportunities for business. How will this landscape change and what can we learn from the innovative partnerships between corporations and the most advanced national security agencies across Europe and North America?