First JUST-AI MET@-Conference

On March 11th, the Justice and AI Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence: Effective Judicial Redress in the Rising European and Global AI litigation (JMCE JUST-AI) inaugurated its cycle of conferences organized in the metaverse. With these MET@-conferences, the Centre ambitions to reach out to audiences from around the world by providing unique experiences and opportunities to discuss with renowned experts in the field of artificial intelligence. These conferences are open to any interested person, their backgrounds, professional experience and location notwithstanding and provide virtual discussion spaces where the speakers and participants can, through their avatars, virtually socialize and exchange views on the presented topics.

For the first conference, Professor Ugo Pagallo (University of Turin, Italy) did us the honour of being the first speaker in this series of conferences. His lecture—The Myths of EU Law—identified four myths underlying the EU's ambition to regulate new digital technologies, AI in particular.

The four myths are:

1. Digital constitutionalism;
2. Digital sovereignty;
3. Human-centric AI; and
4. Brussels effect

For Prof. Pagallo, although these myths are not worthless, paying too much attention to them means missing the elephant in the room, namely, the ethical debate intrinsic to the political ambition to export European values abroad, and the environmental impact of these technologies.

The conference started with an introductory word by Ljupcho Grozdanovski. The metaverse space was adapted by Jérôme De Cooman based on a canvas available on spatial.io. This conference was organised with the support of the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union.

Stay tuned for the next MET@ Conference!