There is a wide agreement that Artificial Intelligence will affect our future in many ways. Just to cite a few examples: economic development, national defense, people security and privacy. Several reports published by McKinsey in 2018 estimated that the worldwide market value that will be unlocked by AI will be larger than 15 Trillion US dollars per year. However, as underlined by these reports, the value unlocked in every single country will depend on its readiness level, where the readiness level depends, among the other, on the investments in AI, research activities on AI, human capital, labor market structure. In the ranking, we have four classes. The first class includes the USA and China, while the second class includes several countries, including the UK, France, Germany, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Norway, South Korea. Italy is classified in the third class together with Costa Rica, India, Lithuania, Spain. According to this report, Italy suffers from important structural weaknesses, in particular related to the labor market. AI development is now considered so crucial for a country that national strategies are needed. Where a national strategy should define the steps necessary to improve the level of readiness and to promote the development of adoption of AI in companies, public administration, and education. The economic development coordination to lead benefits to citizens, is just one of the tasks a national strategy has to deal with. Another crucial task is how to protect the citizens from potential unintended consequences. This task pushes for the need for regulations, also including ethical and legal issues. The first nation to develop a national strategy was Canada in 2017. The name was Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy and it focused on investments for scientific/technical research and talents. Four were the main goals: increasing the number of researchers identifying excellence clusters supporting the leadership on economics, ethics, legal issues supporting the scientific research community After Canada, many other countries developed their own AI strategy. Interestingly, no two strategies are alike, with each focusing on different aspects of AI policy: scientific research, talent development, skills and education, public and private section adoption, ethics and inclusion, standards and regulations, and data and digital infrastructure. Among all the AI national strategies developed so far, the strategies of the USA, China and Europe are surely the most important. And, most interestingly, they adopt completely different perspectives. For instance, in the USA and in China the regulation problem is postponed to the next 5-10 years, and therefore, currently, the development is largely deregulated. While in the USA the development is mainly driven by big tech companies, in China it is mainly driven by the government. Instead, Europe posed the regulation problem as the primary problem to address before massively developing AI technologies. In the next three lectures, we will analyze in depth these three strategies.
