The Sherpa artificial intelligence (AI) project, funded by the European Union (EU), has proposed five scenarios in which AI is likely to play a major role within the next six years.
The EU provided funding to the scheme to promote the responsible development and use of AI in the following five scenarios:
- Information warfare
- Educational robots, or "learning buddies"
- People-mimicking applications
- Driverless cars
- Predictive policing
Sherpa researchers have opened their proposal for public review, with the hope of receiving feedback on the potential ethical, legal, social, and economic implications of incorporating AI in these five applications. They will accept comments from the public until Friday, 31 August 2019.
"Our aim is to understand and address the existing and future challenges in AI so that we can advocate the most sustainable solutions that benefit both innovators and society," project coordinator Bernd Stahl, PhD, of De Montfort University, Leicester, U.K., said in a statement. "We want to know what measures policymakers should be adopting to make sure we can deliver a desirable future."
The researchers plan to use feedback from key stakeholders and the general public to inform the set of recommendations they will develop for policymakers regarding the future of AI development.
![A normal mammogram confirmed by three-year radiologic follow-up illustrates reader-marked regions of interest (ROIs) during (A) unaided (round 1) and (B) artificial intelligence (AI)–assisted (round 2) reading. Each colored dot represents an ROI for recall by a human reader. Readers could mark more than one ROI per case, represented by multiple dots of the same color. During AI-assisted reading, the AI system displayed three visible prompts: two with suspicion of malignancy scores of 35% (left mediolateral oblique [L MLO] and craniocaudal [L CC]) and one with a suspicion of malignancy score of 10% (right craniocaudal [R CC]), shown as polygonal overlays. Without AI, six of 10 readers (60%) marked a false-positive ROI. With AI assistance, this fell to two of 10 (20%). R MLO = right mediolateral oblique.](https://img.auntminnieeurope.com/mindful/smg/workspaces/default/uploads/2026/07/2026-07-14-radiology-mammogram-ai-auto-bias.H0bYO8QlWs.jpg?auto=format%2Ccompress&dpr=2&fit=crop&h=167&q=70&w=250)
