A draft concept for the regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) and robots in the Russian Federation can be developed in 2018, said Ruslan Ibragimov, Vice President of MTS, who is the head of the working group of the Digital Economy program in the direction of Regulatory Regulation.
“On cyber-physical systems, artificial intelligence and robots … Considering that so far no country has adopted any clear regulation in this area, we have proposed to move away from the general concept inherent in the Digital Economy program in terms of creating specific acts, we recommended to first work on a concept of how we will regulate artificial intelligence, what forks we must go through before we reach specific legislative acts,”he said during a roundtable on Monday.
“Therefore, from our point of view, a large general professional analysis of this topic is important, we took the time for this, but we set the deadlines quite aggressively in order to reach the standard by the end of the year,” he added.
The Chairman of the Board of the Skolkovo Foundation (which is the center of competence in the area of regulatory regulation) Igor Drozdov noted that it is necessary to determine the legal status of robots and the scope of AI.
The deputy head of the Ministry of Economic Development Savva Shipov said that an action plan has already been prepared in the direction of "Normative regulation". The plan contains a large number of specific bills that are expected to be adopted in 2018-2019. “We have to work in real time, therefore, as part of the work on the plan, we tried to abandon a large number of program documents, concepts and move on to specific plans, specific amendments to the legislation that need to be adopted in the near future,” the deputy minister said.
In addition, according to Shipov, in 2018 it is planned to prepare a concept for a comprehensive change in legal regulation. “We must think about how our legislation will globally change due to the fact that our relations are changing, a new subject of relations arises and there is a need to somehow regulate them and fit into the traditional scheme of our legislation. Therefore, one of the tasks of 2018 is the preparation of the concept of integrated regulation, which will include issues on which we could not agree and decide now, including everything related to artificial intelligence, many other topics,”said the Deputy Minister.
He also noted that the adoption of regulations should be significantly reduced in comparison with the currently existing norms. “The speed of changes that are taking place now differs significantly from the speed that was, for example, last year. We understand that now the speed of adoption of a normative legal act - not even a law - is more than 300 days. Three hundred days in the regime of the need for rapid changes is an unacceptably long period,”explained Shipov.
Promotional video:
Infrastructure
Deputy Head of the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications Aleksey Kozyrev announced the readiness of the action plan for another direction of the program - "Information Infrastructure". “To date, this action plan, which was presented by the competence center, has been approved by 24 federal executive bodies. All ideas, proposals, decisions that it contains have been tested for feasibility, and we are ready to accept this plan after its approval by the government for implementation for the next three years,”said the Deputy Minister.
According to him, the plan contains three main directions - providing Internet access throughout the country, building a data storage and processing center, and creating digital platforms for using available data.
According to the vice-president of Rostelecom (which is the center of competence in this area) Boris Glazkov, in general, the need for financing the Information Infrastructure direction for three years (2018-2020 inclusive) is estimated at 433 billion rubles, of which most - 299 billion rubles will be required to create so-called hybrid communication networks, including the use of satellite constellation.
The project of hybrid networks was initiated by the Russian Space Systems holding (RKS, a subsidiary of the Roscosmos state corporation) in 2015, said Roman Kirillov, a representative of RKS. “This is a new system that will interact with ground infrastructure and will allow citizens, businesses and the state to exchange information and transmit it through a satellite low-orbit system,” Kirillov said. He did not elaborate on the details of the project, noting that this could be done in early 2018. At the same time, he assured that the project does not imply state funding, it is planned to use funds from investors, including banks and telecom operators.
Kozyrev noted that hybrid networks may be required to provide communication in hard-to-reach and sparsely populated areas.
According to Glazkov, without taking into account investments in hybrid communication networks, the implementation of other infrastructure tasks will require 134 billion rubles in three years, of which budget funds - 106.8 billion rubles (38 billion rubles in 2018, 34.3 billion rubles in 2019 and 34.5 billion rubles in 2020).
Glazkov spoke about the expected results of the plan. So, in 2020, it is expected that about 5 thousand settlements with a population of 250-500 people will be connected to the Internet (this is a continuation of the program of eliminating digital inequality implemented by Rostelecom). It is also expected that about 14 thousand medical organizations, 80% of educational institutions - and not only schools, but also other educational institutions will be connected to the network. It is assumed that 98% of the transport infrastructure will also be connected to the Internet. It is also planned to create 5G communication networks "in two sectors of the economy and in a number of million-plus cities." In addition, it is planned to provide broadband Internet access to all government bodies.
It is also planned to build data centers in six federal districts, including Siberia, the Far East, and the Urals. It is also planned to transfer to the state unified cloud platform about 40% of federal state information systems.
Speaking about the development of 5G networks in the Russian Federation, Dmitry Petrov, Director of Megafon for Relations with Government Agencies, noted that a number of industry experts proposed to hold an auction for the allocation of frequencies for the creation of such networks already in 2018, without waiting for the decision of the World Radio Conference, where technology for fifth generation networks. This will allow us to prepare for the launch of projects in 2019-2020, as well as replenish the budget.
