Regulating towards independence: EU AI policy and ethics
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- Semantic Scholar2026-08-02 07:15:26Regulating towards independence: EU AI policy and ethics
MIT Science Policy Review spoke with Gianluca Sgueo about the evolving landscape of digital public policy and AI regulation in Europe. Sgueo is a Senior Associate Researcher at the Center for Digitalization, Democracy and Innovation of the Brussels School of Governance. He authored The Design of Digital Democracy, in which he examines how design principles of mass technology, such as simplicity, speed, and singularity, reshape democratic spaces in ways that often undermine meaningful civic engagement. Sgueo was a policy advisor at the Digital Transformation Team of the Italian Government and Head of Communication and Stakeholder Engagement of the Office of the Italian Prime Minister. He studies e-government, the gamification of public services, and the tension between digital innovation and democratic inclusion. In our conversation, Sgueo reflects on the EU AI Act's risk-based regulatory approach, the structural barriers to European digital sovereignty, and the influence of major US technology companies on EU governance frameworks. He highlights the gap between AI ethics principles and their translation into binding legislation, drawing on the trajectory of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (hyperlink{leg_1}{4}) as a precedent for durable regulatory impact. Sgueo also addresses the democratic risks of agentic AI, the under representation of cultures and languages other than English in large language models, and the urgent need for technological literacy as a foundation for inclusive digital democracy. He concludes with a cautionary note on emerging ideological currents that seek to decouple technological development from democratic accountability.