China in implementation, and the United States in research, are the world’s leading powers in Artificial Intelligence. Faced with these powers, the humblest Finland has set out to lead the race on the other side: to have the population better prepared to use, apply and live with technology, in a democracy of better informed people. The training plan has started with a course on the fundamentals of AI, designed for people who do not know about programming, which has been taught to 1% of the population. The plan has been reviewed by the MIT Technology Review.

In the initial online course, designed for people without expertise in technology, 10,500 have already graduated people by December 2018. The course is also available to everyone in English, so at least 4,000 have completed it as well foreign people. In addition, more than 250 companies have given the course as part of their job training. However, the ideologue of the course, University of Helsinki professor of computer science Teemu Roos, did not design the course solely for business purposes. His intention is to provide voters with the necessary information to be able to weigh how the country should invest in AI and how it should legislate in this area.

According to a study by Oxford University’s Center for Artificial Intelligence Governance, US citizens do not understand the nature of AI, even though it is already present on a daily basis in Facebook photo tagging or recommendations custom Netflix. The same lack of understanding on the part of legislators can stop innovation unintentionally, or stop avoiding unwanted consequences.