New national strategy: Artificial intelligence should benefit individuals, businesses and society as a whole

14-03-2019

The Danish government is today launching its new National strategy for artificial intelligence. The strategy puts emphasis on an ethical approach to the technology. For Denmark, artificial intelligence entails enormous potentials for both citizens, companies and public authorities.

Today, the Danish government is publishing its new strategy for artificial intelligence. Denmark is already among the most digitized countries in the world, and in our daily use of apps on the phone and search engines on the computer, artificial intelligence is already working for us.

In the strategy, the government puts forth four objectives for how Denmark can become a front-runner in responsible development and use of artificial intelligence:

  1. Denmark should have a common ethical and human-centred basis for artificial intelligence
  2. Danish researchers should research and develop artificial intelligence
  3. Danish businesses should achieve growth through developing and using artificial intelligence
  4. The public sector should use artificial intelligence to offer world-class services

Enormous potential

As the strategy states, the use of artificial intelligence should benefit both citizens, businesses and public authorities. For example, artificial intelligence can help people read and translate foreign languages or help find the fastest route through the morning traffic.

For Danish businesses, artificial intelligence will help develop new business models and offer faster deliveries, because the technology can help predict tomorrow's demand for different goods and services.

Finally, the public sector will be able to use the advanced technology to, among other things, identify cardiac arrests based on the citizen's voice during emergency calls.

Strong focus on ethics

Just as the Internet, artificial intelligence holds a wealth of opportunities. However, the technology also raises a number of ethical issues.

With the strategy, the Danish government makes clear that it has to be individuals who make the important decisions. Artificial intelligence must assist human decisions – not replace them. Similarly, the use of technology must be consistent with our society's democratic values.

Key initiatives

The strategy contains 24 initiatives aimed at strengthening the development and use of artificial intelligence in Denmark.

  • Principles for responsible development and use of artificial intelligence
    Ethical principles will be set as the framework for development and use of artificial intelligence. These principles will be supplemented with initiatives to strengthen cyber security, creating legal clarity as well as ensuring responsible and transparent use of artificial intelligence in the public sector.

  • Common Danish language resource
    A common Danish language resource will be established to support and accelerate the development of language-technology solutions in Danish. The language resource will be freely available, enabling suppliers to build on existing knowledge to create new solutions within voice recognition and language understanding to benefit citizens, authorities and businesses.

  • More open public-sector data for artificial intelligence
    In collaboration with the businesses and research communities, the government will identify five public-sector datasets during 2020 and 2021, which can be made accessible for businesses, researchers and public authorities and contribute to developing artificial intelligence. This public data will not be personal data, but for example environment and climate data, or location data in the transport area.

  • Signature projects in the public sector 
    There is a lack of experience on the use of artificial intelligence in the public sector. Therefore, the government will launch a number of signature projects within health, the social and employment areas, and cross-sector case processing. 

  • Stronger investment in Danish businesses
    It is proposed to launch a pilot project in the form of an investment pool of DKK 20 million (EUR 3.1 million) over four years be targeting at businesses with a business model based on artificial intelligence. The prerequisite for this is a 50 percent financing from the private sector amounting to a total investment pool of DKK 40 million (EUR 6.2 million). The fund will be managed by the Danish Growth Fund.