[MUSIC] >> Hi, Mark.

>> Hey, Julie.

>> First, I have a cold, so I apologize.

I sound a little bit like a frog.

If I cough, you'll help me out.

>> We got it.

>> I'm so excited to be here.

This room is full and full of so much energy.

What's happening here today explains to me, really illustrates for me what's happening with AI in New York.

In other parts of the country, people are talking about AI in a vacuum, in a bubble.

But here, we understand that AI is actually going to power everything else and everything else that's already in New York.

So it's such a New York story to me, and I'm really, really glad to be able to talk about that here with you today and with all of you.

But like Noah said, you're one of the most thoughtful elected officials on a lot of issues.

But this issue in particular, really reached out.

One of the first people we spoke with at TechNYC, as it was clear that AI is the next frontier in tech.

I think it would be great if you could start and just talk a little bit about how you're thinking about that, what you think it means for the city, what you're watching out for.

>> Absolutely.

First of all, Noah Breyer, that was like the best TED Talk I've ever heard.

Wow.

Amazing.

I want my first copy of AI aficionado.

I can't wait.

How many of you are from New York City or work here?

Okay.

Excellent.

Give it up for the New Yorkers, we like that.

To the rest of you unfortunate people, I hope we'll make the case that you want to be here.

We have the most brilliant creatives on earth.

We have a huge and booming tech sector, and we set the fashion and trends for the world.

So it all comes together in New York.

I'm excited to talk a little bit about the big picture beyond what's happening in brand marketing, because I think all of us need to be grappling with the implications of what is about to hit us.

I think we are entering in probably to the most rapid and disruptive period of technological advance in human history, with huge potential upside for health and education and our economy, and also real downsides, potentially, and real risks, potentially, in spreading misinformation and undermining privacy and copyright and disruption of jobs and potentially worse.

And I think we have decisions that we have to make by yesterday to steer this in the right direction.

It depends on us at this stage.

And that's not only a job for the federal government or international bodies.

This is something that we have to think about at the local level that all of you as professionals have to think about.

And part of what I'm trying to use my platform to do is to get people focused on this.

And I got to say, so far, that's not going very well.

And I've thought a lot about why it is that people outside of niches like this just aren't paying attention to what's coming.

And I think people feel like, you know, the last 40 years, we've had constant technological change.

And so this is going to continue.

But what I say to people, well, what if those 40 years were condensed into the next five years?

What would that mean for you, for your job, for your city?

And I think there's really no aspect of city government and probably public life that we don't need to be reconsidering now in light of what's coming and that we have an opportunity and an obligation to shape it.

And I hope we can talk about that here.

Yeah, one of the things I've been thinking a lot about is how AI can actually power how city government works better for citizens.

You know, years and years ago, in the last administration, I was on a city hall task force where we thought a lot about that.

And our city now has put out guidelines thinking about using AI.

But there's risks associated with it, right?

I mean, I don't know if you all saw this, but one of the agencies here had put up a chatbot through the city where you could ask questions about regulation.

And I mean, I felt great about it when we rolled it out, when the city rolled it out.

Like, this is a great use of an AI.

You know, it ingests a lot of information from all different agencies where the websites don't always talk to each other now.

And it turns out it's spitting out some wrong information.

Yeah.

I mean, so how are you thinking about how-- I just-- it's like, maybe the branding people have the best answer.

How do we get to a space where we can take some risks, but not screw it up?

It's complicated.

It is.

That was a cautionary tale for sure.

I think big picture, there's probably no aspect of city government that doesn't need to be reinvented now.

That's certainly true for K-12 education.

It is true for workforce development.

It's probably true for how we oversee elections because of all the risks this technology poses.

And I can go through agency after agency and see big problems that have to be fixed.

You know, if you want to build affordable housing in New York City, and we have a desperate need for affordable housing, whatever your timeline is, you've got to add six months to the process because of how long it takes for the housing agency to process the term sheets and the loan documents.

Well, what if technology got that done in six hours instead of six months and thousands of New Yorkers in need got their affordable housing faster?

There are probably 200,000 people in New York City who qualify for food stamps or SNAP officially that don't receive them.

What if we could make it incredibly easy to apply?

Most New Yorkers have a smartphone at this point.

What if we could have something on your phone in plain English or plain any language?

So technology could solve big problems that we're facing in government, including in health care, Julie.

So we're going to get you over to CityMD right after this.

But no, not at all.

Please drink water copiously.

And this is live theater, so we're going to keep it going for sure.

I'm spending so much time thinking about the economic development angle.

So when we think about New York and when we think about where AI is going, there's the kind of regulatory bucket, like are we going to pass laws?

What are the laws going to look like?

How are we going to regulate this stuff?

Obviously, Senator Schumer is really taking a lead on that in DC.

But then the other bucket is really I'm thinking so much about how we make sure that we're building the AI tools, using the AI tools here in New York, that we're centering a lot of this economic development and technological development here in New York.

I just think we have a more integrated process here, where industry works with government, works with other industry.

It's messier, but what comes out at the end is hopefully a little bit more well-rounded than some other places.

One project I wanted to quickly talk about that we've spent a lot of time working on this year is called Empire AI.

I'm really proud this came together.

This is a state project.

The governor of New York put this in her state budget for 2025, which just passed a few weeks ago.

It's a $400 million supercomputer that we're going to build in Buffalo.

And it's a partnership between CUNY, the City University of New York, SUNY, State University of New York, Columbia, NYU, Cornell, and RPI, and eventually, hopefully, more institutions as well.

But the idea is that right now, in order to build and to really use a lot of these AI tools, as I'm sure you all know, you need an insane amount of computing power.

And really, only the largest tech companies can afford that.

And so we're really thinking about how we can empower the universities to do research, how we can empower startups, how we can empower nonprofits, how we can make sure that as these AI tools proliferate, you know, all ships are rising together.

So I really think New York is already out front on that.

This Empire AI Project is a first-in-the-nation project.

And it also speaks, I think, to some of the themes that you all talk about today, too.

It's like, how do we empower academics, researchers, not just computer science professors, but, you know, professors who are thinking about climate, or academics who are thinking about healthcare, or whatever the subject or branding, to also take advantage of these new technologies? - Yes.

I am biased, but I think it's really important that New York have a role in leading.

I don't want this to be another technological revolution that's entirely controlled by the same bubble of a small number of people in the Bay Area.

I think, as you said to me, there's a huge benefit when the people envisioning this and steering it get on the subway every morning in a place like New York City and interact with people from all walks of life.

And this is a place where all the cultures of the world come together that should have a prominent role in steering this.

And by having the capacity that's being built to this Empire AI initiative, by having it in the hands of academia, which has kind of been left behind in AI, we can focus on the upsides.

This could supercharge healthcare, and life sciences, and education, and climate research.

It's going to happen because of Empire AI, and New York is where this should all be centered. - We at TechNYC recently put out some research with Accenture, actually, just last week, and I have a couple of these stats here.

So I want to talk a little bit about...well, let me read a stat or two.

So we surveyed a bunch of executives, 500 kind of C-suite folks.

We determined that almost two-thirds of work hours, so 63%, will be automated or augmented by generative AI in New York.

But, you know, this is especially true in financial services, banking, capital markets, but it's true of all kinds of jobs.

You know, you hinted at this at the beginning, but I was hoping we could spend a little time talking about what this means for the workforce, and how we should be thinking about it as a city, but frankly, as a society. - Yeah.

I mean, the question of job disruption keeps me up at night.

It's probably going to impact all of your staff too, when you see what these capabilities are.

And on that, there is economic opportunity here, but I worry about people who are made redundant and whose jobs are lost.

I worry about what we're training this current generation of young people for.

I don't think, as a society, we pivoted in the way that we need to.

I also, I think a lot about creatives, which you all work with, many of you are.

And what does it mean if your life's work as a graphic designer has now been ingested in the training model of an AI system that can replicate your style for free to anyone in the world?

That's not fair, in my opinion, and that's impacting a lot of New Yorkers as well.

I think you should have the option of opting out of having your content in the training runs, or you should have the option of benefiting in some way, if you so choose.

Maybe there could be a financial model that would allow you to benefit if your content is used that way.

But I talk to people in New York who have enormous anxiety about this.

And look, I think the obvious place to start is with our young people, so that kids graduating from New York City public schools have a fighting shot at getting jobs in the emerging professions.

And we really haven't pivoted to make that happen.

We are barely training people coming out of New York City high schools for the basic skills of computer science.

Forget about things like machine learning or data analytics.

I mean, that's almost totally not being taught to graduates of our schools.

That's not acceptable.

And people say, well, it's hard to turn a battleship.

And the New York City public schools with almost a million kids, it's hard to reform.

But in the 1950s, after Sputnik, America freaked out, and we started teaching chemistry to every single kid in this country.

And the reason why all of you know that water is three little atoms that come together to make a molecule is because of that pivot.

And every single public school in New York City, or almost every one, has a chemistry lab, and that's great.

And those cost almost a million dollars each to build.

And I've helped fund some of those, and I will continue to.

But we don't have any GPU clusters that kids in New York City public schools can use or access or learn from.

And we don't have time to do a five-year blue ribbon commission to develop a strategic plan on this.

There's stuff that should be in place for the school year, which starts in September.

Or our public school kids are going to get left behind.

New York is going to get left behind.

And there'll be a lot of pain and disruption in the wake of that.

You know, New York City is actually better than a lot of other places on computer science education in our public schools.

We've got a great program called CS for All, and we're still behind.

You know, I just had to make a plug for that.

But you're exactly right.

And also, guys, Mark used to be a teacher.

Can you tell?

This is true.

Yeah.

I've been thinking about that also, not just from a workforce development angle, which is crucial and what you said so well, so I don't need to repeat it.

But I also think we've done our students a disservice by not teaching them, by not giving them tools to live in a world where technologies are prevalent.

I mean, I think you really see this with social media.

We basically like sent a generation of kids out to, you know, to play on the Internet without really having any rules of the road.

And I think the schools are a place where we shouldn't just be training people to build these tools, but just we should be training them to understand, like, what these tools mean and do and think about misinformation and disinformation.

And I am hopeful, but I fear it's hard, too, that our public schools.

Yeah.

Two-thirds of public schools in New York City ban access to chat GPT.

So if you're a kid who relies on a device from your school or the school's Wi-Fi, you have no access to these tools to play around with them the way that Noah just was.

But if you're a kid who's a little bit better off and you've got your iPhone with the data plan or you've got Wi-Fi at home, then you're not limited.

And that's really unfair.

I understand.

I've talked to principals.

I understand they are worried about cheating, about bias and misinformation.

And what I say to them is any job conceivably your young people are going to graduate into, they're going to be competing with people who have become comfortable with these tools.

So let's teach them to recognize the bias and understand where it comes from.

Let's teach them to recognize misinformation, which is going to be proliferating on social media.

Teach them to recognize the limitations.

As Noah said, that yeah, they hallucinate and you can take advantage of that for creative purposes.

But if you just block access, then our kids benefit from none of that and are at a huge disadvantage.

I totally agree.

I've got a couple of stats I'm going to layer on top of that because when you survey the executives across the city, you find that 99% are already planning to augment investments they're making in AI. 92% are planning to recruit new AI talent in the next three years here in the city.

And 97% firmly believe that AI will yield a net positive impact on society, which is to say that the top business executives in New York know that AI is coming.

The genie is not going back in the bottle.

You all obviously know that or you wouldn't be here, but we have to make sure that we're obviously preparing all kinds of New Yorkers for that eventuality as well.

Putting our heads in the sand is not going to be the answer.

We have workforce training programs in this city like every city.

We're still training people for entry-level jobs and bookkeeping.

I don't know if we should be doing that right now.

And it's not just specific jobs that could be obsolete.

I think any job you're going to have to learn comfort with these tools and it's going to require a total rethinking very fast about how we're training the next generation.

I loved your Sputnik example too, because if history is any guide, this moment teaches us that it's not like jobs are just going to disappear.

There will be new jobs.

Another example that gets used all the time is the ATM.

Everyone was like, "Oh God, where are all the bankers going to go?"

The bank tellers.

It's fine.

There are new jobs, but the transition is tough.

The transition is hard and that's where we need policymakers to step in with our help to help us navigate those really uncomfortable moments.

I have no doubt that on the end, it will be fine.

But until we get to that end, it's going to be messy.

Well I guess I spent a lot of time talking to my fellow policymakers about this and I opened by saying I'm frustrated about how little care.

And I think it's probably not going to change until your local city council member and your local congress member and your local mayor, wherever you're from, start to hear from you.

And start to hear you ask tough questions.

Are we preparing for this?

Are we steering this?

We ready for what this will mean for local elections?

Do you have protections in place against campaigns that use deep fake voice of opponents to try and embarrass a rival campaign?

What are you doing about this?

What are you doing in my kid's school?

Right now elected officials are not hearing from the public.

I think you as people who have a voice and have influence in your sector and as just regular New Yorkers or citizens around the country, you need to start speaking up and you need to light a fire on people who are in a position to make policy.

Again, not just at the national level, at the state level, at the local level, right down to your neighborhood.

I couldn't agree more.

Let me just ask, we only have one more minute, so we're almost done here.

But what I've actually never asked you, but I've known you're always interested in this stuff is how, why?

What, you know, why?

I actually majored in physics in college and I am not in that field anymore.

Don't quiz me.

But it definitely still impacts how I think about policy, about how I do my job.

Physics teaches you that if you have a really complicated problem and you attack it from enough different angles, eventually it gives up its secret.

And this is a really big problem.

And we got to attack it from every angle.

And there's a lot we don't even understand about the technology, let alone how to make policy around it.

So I think every policymaker and every professional needs to put some work in to understand how this technology works.

And I have enough math to understand a little bit about what gradient descent is and things like backward propagation, which Noel probably can explain better than me.

I'm lucky in that way.

I think all of us have to push ourselves out of our comfort zone to at least try and grapple with the technical side of what is about to hit us so that we can shape it.

And I'm trying to do that in my role as Manhattan Borough President.

Well, we're grateful for that.

And we're grateful for all of you too.

And Noah, thank you so much.

We're out of time.

Thank you.

All right.

All right.

Thank you. (upbeat music)

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