March 2018
Current efforts to find answers to the ethical, societal and legal challenges that they pose and to orient them for the common good represent a patchwork of disparate initiatives. This underlines the need for a collective, wide-ranging and inclusive process of reflection and dialogue, a dialogue that focuses on the values around which we want to organise society and on the role that technologies should play in it. This statement calls for the launch of a process that would pave the way towards a common, internationally recognised ethical and legal framework for the design, production, use and governance of artificial intelligence, robotics, and ‘autonomous’ systems. The statement also proposes a set of fundamental ethical principles, based on the values laid down in the EU Treaties and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, that can guide its development.