While Artificial Intelligence (AI) is poised to dramatically change our lives, it is still unclear how our future will look like. Often presented as one of the most promising technologies of the decade, AI gives us hope for economic, societal, and ecological progress. Alongside this hope, AI already generates various adverse social consequences (e.g., such as fake news, distorted market competition, algorithmic bias and discrimination, etc.).  

To tackle these challenges, regulators around the globe are enacting laws, putting forward policy guidelines and regulatory proposals. Prominent examples in the EU include the famous General Data Protection Regulation, as well as proposals such as the Digital Markets Act and the AI Act. North America is following that lead through the adoption of various state-level privacy laws in the United States and the Ontario’s Trustworthy AI framework proposal, while the Chinese government has also been vigorously rolling out a series of laws regulating personal information and internet recommendation algorithms.

In this track, we address the issues of AI use and its regulation from three complementary perspectives: law, economics, and finance. A key aspect of the proposed rules for AI include ethics principles, such as the need for truth, fairness and equity. Further, recognizing that many digital markets are dominated by a few superstar firms, the policy discussion is to bring together the previously separate regulatory fields of competition policy (e.g. antitrust and merger control) and consumer protection (e.g. consumer rights) to ensure a balance between firm growth and innovation, on the one hand, and fair competition and privacy protection, on the other. Lastly, recognizing the dangers of algorithmic discrimination for minorities, social scoring, or consumer creditworthiness, there is a need for a discussion with practitioners on the new proposed requirements regarding the fair use and dissemination of data and software for financial services, lending and asset management. 

Experts from academia and practice will discuss whether the existing legal framework and recent policy proposals are going in the right direction, considering likely side-effects and unintended consequences.