Lorenzo Cotino, president of the Spanish Data Protection Agency, argued in Madrid that artificial intelligence will mark the labor and legal evolution of the coming years and called for a clearer European framework for its development. He did so at a meeting organized by the International Association of Privacy Professionals alongside Google, Ecija, and the Spanish Association of Compliance at Ecija's headquarters.
The central message of his speech was based on a specific tension. While artificial intelligence advances towards increasingly automated decisions and processes, Cotino maintained that the immediate future will require more human control, while at the same time admitting that this supervision will also have to be automated in many tasks because it already exceeds human capabilities.
Cotino positioned artificial intelligence as a legal and labor turning point
During his speech, Cotino stated that artificial intelligence represents "the greatest of the great technological and legal turning points of our time." He also argued that those involved in its deployment do not play a passive role in this change.
"We are actors and not spectators in defining this future and ensuring it follows the path of security and the protection of rights" - Lorenzo Cotino, president of the Spanish Data Protection Agency
Along the same lines, the president of the AEPD maintained that the evolution of work in practically all sectors will involve a hybrid model. In this scheme, people will direct, validate, and control artificial intelligence systems integrated into management and decision-making.
Cotino added that this control cannot rest solely on manual review. His approach is that human supervision of these systems will have to be automated in many tasks due to scale and operational capacity.
The AEPD has already approved an internal policy and calls for more defined European rules
As an example of this approach, Cotino explained that the Spanish Data Protection Agency has been the first Spanish public administration to develop an internal policy for the use of artificial intelligence. The objective of this document is to promote the adoption of these tools with criteria of legal certainty and privacy.
Furthermore, he called for a European regulatory framework that facilitates the use of personal data to train artificial intelligence models. His request involves establishing reinforced guarantees and better-defined legal conditions than those provided for in the Omnibus reform of the GDPR.
The president of the AEPD also referred to the processing of biometric data. At that point, he positively assessed the European Commission's proposal to relax the limitations of Article 9 of the GDPR for this type of processing.
The intervention included another specific announcement. The AEPD will update its guide on biometric systems, a reference document for delimiting the use of these technologies in the processing of specially protected data.