Yesterday the Council of Ministers approved, with a month’s delay, the bill on artificial intelligence. It was a long-awaited provision on a technology that has been talked about every day for over a year, alternating messianic tones with apocalyptic ones (by the way, this morning Pope Francis received the big boss of Cisco Chuck Robbins who signed the Rome Declaration for the ethical use of artificial intelligence). Whatever you think, everyone will have to deal with this technology and it will not be a bubble, a communication fad, as happened with the metaverse, NFTs and the blockchain. There are companies that are already redesigning processes based on the opportunities offered by artificial intelligence and there are more and more professionals who use it as a tutor or advisor to work better.
In this scenario, Italy is, as usual, far behind and this bill, if approved, does not seem capable of making us recover many positions in the rankingsto. But it stays important: not so much for the principles it reiterates, which are the same as those established by European standards; how much for the billion euros to invest in startups. During the approval process, there will be a lot of discussion in Parliament about the governance of this sector: who should be responsible?
The bill chose to keep it under the presidency of the Council of Ministers through the Agency for Digital Italy and the National Agency for Cyber Security. The opposition protests by highlighting the fact that any abuses by the executive in the use of this technology would not be monitored by an independent authority. A small, apparently harmless, but very significant rule has been inserted into this scenario: allows high school students who have a high cognitive potential to attend university courses and gain training credits. It is a zero-cost rule, but which allows young talents not to waste time acquiring training and contacts that can be fundamental for their future and for Italian basic and applied research. It would be nice if the majority and opposition were united on this point and indeed, upon approval, the law was extended, allowing young people to participate in research projects and be qualified as inventors, enjoying the profits deriving from the commercialization of their inventions.