Do you mean an absence of data about energy use? Or do you mean the idea that this technology is talked about as mythical rather than infrastructure?
I mean the former. I think that, frankly, there’s an attempt to make this technology seem as if it is mythical or as if it is divine.
Unknowable.
There is a real investment in the idea that this is so complicated that the only rational response should be that we trust those who created it.
In many ways, it’s what Facebook was arguing in 2008, that they should be able to regulate themselves. Yet what we need to see is a response that grasps the scale of the adoption of this technology and the incentives that are driving a lot of this technology at this time, and the fact that we are now at a point where there are far too many similarities between the housing bubble and the state of AI in our economy today.
You worry that we’re in a bubble?
Yes.
You worry that bubble’s gonna pop?
Yes.
Do you trust the Sam Altmans of the world?
No. Do you trust the Sam Altmans of the world?
I’m not the one being interviewed.
No.
But no, I don’t. In the context of AI, you focus obviously on New York. What is your role in shaping how AI affects New Yorkers?
It’s a role on a practical level. I also think it’s a role that reckons with the enormity of AI’s impact. Now, on the practical level, it means formulating one of the most comprehensive AI moratoriums in any American school system, which we put forward, that would ban the use of generative AI for students from 2K through eighth grade.
Ban it because we need students to be given the room to be students. Students to be able to try and fail and learn, and also to bring an end to the use of our students as guinea pigs for the profit motives of technology companies. There’s been this strange thing over the last few years, maybe last few decades: While we would not be willing to have a pharmaceutical company help write the curriculum of a science class, we have been all too willing to partner with technology companies to not just inform the products that are used in the classroom, but also how they are taught.