Peter Felser
Artificial Intelligence
German Bundestag, December 20, 2019,
Plenarprotokoll 19/138, p. 17240
[Peter Felser
is an Alternative für Deutschland Bundestag member from Bavaria. He is an IT
businessman.]
Right
honorable Herr President. Dear colleagues.
I
wish to use the present opportunity to address some self-evident postulates of KI [artificial intelligence] use, for
which neither strategy papers nor experts discussions are needed and which will
make clear where the problem lies, in Germany and in Europe.
First:
Society. There is not one European firm among the top ten hardware manufacturers.
Among the top ten internet firms, there is found not one from Europe. And among
the top ten software makers is only one European firm: The well known firm of SAP
in Walldorf. Our future mobile telephone indeed will be Chinese. That is the
situation. Dear government, how will you then retain control of our citizens
data, concerning which we are speaking of today?
Generalleutnant
Leinhos, Inspector of the Bundeswehr command for cyber and information space,
has often warned of the digital defense situation and the consequences for our
society. Of the particularly influential application areas of artificial
intelligence – of which we have already heard today – data security is the most
important basic principle; for example, for health care, or for
de-bureaucratization or for slimming down the officialdom. For that, we require
promptly dedicated European data rooms.
Second:
Citizens’ rights. In regards the possible processing of data by the
administration, it must be guaranteed that neither officials nor firms be
able to benefit from the data collected to the disadvantage of the citizen. We want no
Chinese or American situation, dear colleagues. A policy must not be allowed
which so optimizes insurance contributions, credit terms or access to medical
care that individuals or entire groups are systematically disadvantaged. For
that, our democracy requires control bodies, citizen participation at all
levels and a commitment to transparency.
Third:
Education. Solid, fundamental KI research
and a widely presented application training are prerequisites of a socially
useful and, before all, socially acceptable use of artificial intelligence. We
need a central KI campus and a research center for new technologies.
Here,
also, the government has shown itself to be a master of advertising. With their
strategy, they want to hire 100 KI
professors. So far, they have added two. Dear colleagues, two KI professors! According to the
Fraunhofer Institute, Germany lacks 85,000 with academic credentials in the
areas of data analysis and big data. With hand-wringing will be sought more
than 10,000 IT experts with knowledge of advanced analytics and data science.
How in the next years will these deficits be filled? Improve, finally, the
research conditions. When there is a lack of money, terminate the gender
professors! That is still perhaps possible…It must happen, ja.
Fourth:
KMU [small and mid-sized businesses],
Mittelstand. Should we grant
unrestricted access to European markets of the future to the great data
gatherers like Google, Amazon or Tencent, then there will remain of the German Mittelstand only a vague memory. Data
availability is the all-limiting factor; you know that. For the small and
mid-sized firms, it is much more difficult to train their own algorithms when
the training data is potentially to be stored by Google, AWS, or Citrix. It is
a platitude of the digital business: He always profits who has the greater amount
of data at his disposal. I very much doubt that he will later become the
carpenter from Kempton or the machine builder from Göppingen.
The
policy must create the framework for a European open data solution. I want our
children to be able to buy a hand-carved Christmas manger from the Erzgebirge
and not just the artificial product of a 3-D printer in Shenzhen. I wish you Merry
Christmas.
Thank
you kindly.
[Translated by Todd Martin]
