27 budget.

This budget will be the state's spending plan beginning July first, and it's commonly referred to as the big budget.

It's finally here, at least in the House.

The budget for the upcoming fiscal year and the constitutionally mandated reason for the General Assembly to meet.

Good evening, and welcome to day 30 of the Georgia Legislative Session.

I'm Donna Lowry in Atlanta tonight.

We're devoting the show to A.I., social media, technology and innovation issues.

We have two guests who will touch on those topics in the areas of agriculture, medicine, transportation, education, labor, and just day to day life for children.

We'll learn about legislation to try to get a handle on how quickly artificial intelligence is changing our world, and how legislators are trying to create laws to rein in some of it.

We begin, as always, with a look at the day at the Capitol from our correspondent Sarah Kallis.

Hi, Donna.

Today at the Capitol, lawmakers were paid a visit by two Trump administration officials, and the House took on their only constitutionally required duty.

The House kicked off the day with a visit from small Business Administrator Kelly Loeffler.

After passing the supplemental budget two weeks ago, the house was added again, this time presenting HB 970 for the fiscal year 2027 budget.

The $38.5 billion budget is 2% higher than last year's budget, and includes more money for literacy coaches in public elementary schools.

We funded $60.8 million related to literacy in this budget.

This is a massive down payment on an historic investment that will get our kindergarten to third graders reading on grade level, effectively moving them from learning to read to reading to learn.

HB 11 93 provides for a literacy coach at 1,313 elementary schools.

These positions will be funded through the QBE program.

Just like teachers, counselors, and principals.

The state's correctional facilities are also receiving investment.

We made great strides in improving our correctional officer workforce, and this budget provides $34.9 million to continue the hiring trajectory to reduce the inmate to correctional officer ratio to 1-12 In FY 27, with goal of 1-11 by the FY 28 budget cycle.

This budget also provides $70 million to the department to continue providing for the physical, mental, dental and pharmaceutical needs of a prison population that has increased to over 50,500 inmates this fiscal year.

, and legislators penciled in more funds for health care and autism therapy.

The budget also includes money for infrastructure improvement and feral hog eradication programs.

HB 974 was passed and immediately transmitted to the Senate.

In the Senate, the first House bills were debated and voted on.

Today, HB 945 was a banking cleanup bill.

A new provision would protect the elderly and people with mental disabilities from financial exploitation by putting a hold on financial transactions suspected to be fraudulent.

The financial institution may reach out to what this bill refers to as a trusted contact.

That would be an adult designated by the account holder and notified this trusted contact of the suspected financial exploitation.

Once a transaction hold has been placed, the financial institution must initiate an investigation.

If the results of the investigation do not indicate financial exploitation, the institution may consummate the transaction.

The bill would also create more stringent guardrails around virtual currency kiosks.

The bill passed unanimously.

HB 115, would require abandoned boats and other watercraft to be registered with the Department of Natural Resources and hold owners responsible for the cost of derelict watercraft cleanup.

This establishes the ability of DNR to board the vessel just to check out, from a safety standpoint, label it abandoned.

They search it in the computers and see if there is an owner, and the owner has about 30 days, has 30 days to remove the vessel.

The bill was passed unanimously.

HB 244 allows extensions for local governments to provide financial audits and changes the monetary requirements before audits would be required by state auditors to receive state funds that passed 48-2 Senate resolution 771 would create a study committee to look at the financial costs incurred by families during the adoption process.

What we need to do now is establish an adoption process here in Georgia that is affordable and transparent, so that the children who want to be adopted or who their mother and father want to put them up for adoption, have the opportunity to move into a loving family.

And those who choose to adopt should know the should should understand the process much better.

I'm hoping that this study committee will also address the affordability of adoption and the responsibility of adoption.

And House resolution 108 would ratify amendments to a statewide water management plan for the state's ten water councils.

Both resolutions were passed at a midday press conference, U.S.

Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins spoke about the supplemental block grants that Georgia farmers can apply for to help with recovery efforts from Hurricane Helene.

Kelly Loeffler, House Speaker Jon Burns, and Governor Brian Kemp joined the secretary for the announcement.

Thanks to your Agriculture Commissioner's incredible work under the leadership of your governor, a new block grant for your farmers here in Georgia of about $561 million that will open up officially for applications this next Monday, March the 16th.

Applications will close April the 27th.

And finally, the annual Gold Dome Kickball Championship took place yesterday at Georgia State University.

Let's go.

Get get wrecked, get wrecked.

Hey.

The House beat the Senate for the second year in a row, 9-3 in a hard fought, injury ridden game.

Speaker Burns gloated a bit about the win today.

The world of kickball championship all world team, all world.

We may be an Olympic sport pretty soon, and we'll be there.

If you would like to sign our victory ball, it'll be here today and tomorrow and Thursday.

We'll have it back.

We'd love for you to sign the ball so we can keep that for historical perspective.

The House and Senate will be back on Thursday for day 31, which is also technology Demo Day at the Capitol.

That's my Capitol report, Donna.

Thanks, Sarah.

We're going to spend the rest of the show discussing legislation on a variety of topics under the A.I., social media and technology umbrella.

For years, Georgia's General Assembly has worked to stay ahead of the game on a few of these issues.

Joining us for the first part of the show is Republican Representative Todd Jones of South Forsyth.

He is chairman of the House Committee on Technology and Infrastructure Innovation.

Welcome to Lawmakers again.

We love having you on.

And there's always a lot to talk about.

So let's get started.

There are so many issues to explore.

Let's start with the workforce.

You would like a committee to explore the potential for humanoid humanoid robots in Georgia to work.

Talk about that a little bit.

Sure, we're going to see advancements in humanoid robots literally at an exponential pace over the next 36 months.

So we need to be figuring out two things.

One, how are the humanoid is going to be coming into the workforce?

May that be at a warehouse or distribution center, or may it be literally in surgery, or may it be in education, or maybe in engineering or architecture.

The second thing we need to be able to do is literally look at how are humans going to work with the humanoids in the robots to basically create leverage to get greater productivity.

So we've got a lot going on here, and we need to make sure Georgia is ready.

So let's talk about break some of this down.

So when it comes to education, you were saying when it comes to the humanoid robots, we may see these assistants with the teachers that are robots 100%.

So when you think about there's areas within Georgia that unfortunately we are understaffed, significantly inside of pre-K, inside of K-12.

Well, even going into our technical colleges, et cetera., we want to make sure that we can put these humanoids as assistants to say, a pre-K teacher, assistants to a kindergarten teacher, because in every public school in the state of Georgia, we do have two individuals inside of pre-K, inside of K, why not have a humanoid as the assistant when we can't get a human to do it?

And the great thing about it is we get to upload the humanoid with the best practices of the best assistants within the state.

And literally almost every day update their skill set.

So they are being a great productivity tool for the teacher, and hopefully a great education tool for our students.

We do have to talk about the fears that people may have, that it's going to take away jobs.

Well, there's no doubt that look, we have seen we can go back to the Pony Express.

We can go back to I remember when ATM machines were going to take out the bank teller.

I remember when Excel was going to make an accountant useless, when in fact we have more accountants today than than we've ever had.

In many ways, we will take the bottom rung of the ladder out.

There's no doubt about that.

But at the same time, though, we will add rungs on the top of the ladder, just like we've seen in tech.

For instance, the CIO and the CTO didn't even exist inside of most companies 30 years ago.

Yet today, there isn't a mid-tier company that doesn't have a CIO or a CTO, and then a large company has both.

We're going to see that upskilling.

So for us, one of the challenges and one of the opportunities we have is to make sure that as we see different skill sets become, I'll say, obsolete, how do we take that individual and do just in time training to upskill them?

So for instance, if today I had a chance, I'd love to upskill people in 3-D CAD.

I'd love to upskill people in CNC finishing.

These are things that our technical colleges do for you, and we can do those in quick certificates.

I think the days and people may not want to hear this five years from now.

It's going to be doubtful that we're going to have students at the TSG level, or even the USG level, going for years at a time without basically breaking that up into education, real world education, real world, because the world's going too fast and we can't just take them out of that world for 2-4 years.

So we're not going to do 2-4 years.

We're going to say do a couple of years, learn a little bit, get out there in the world and find out about it.

It's going to let's talk about K-12, though.

And before.

Yeah.

So how do you prepare students for jobs we don't even know about.

So I think how we prepare them is is constantly getting making sure that they understand to lean into these productivity tools.

One of the challenges we had literally just a couple of years ago was, should we lean into A.I.

Because kids were going to cheat?

I'm putting that in quotes.

Well, no doubt they were absolutely starting to use it for its most fundamental things, which is, can you write an essay, can you write a book report, et cetera.?

But what we started to see those schools that were being most successful with A.I.

Was actually teaching the children to lean into these productivity tools, and then the expectations of those children are even higher, because we're expecting you to do what you can do, plus what the tools should have done for you.

Now, suddenly, instead of going here, the child's going to go to here.

I think it's a win-win all around.

As long as we make sure that the child understands how they can work with the tools, and then as they're going through K-12, by the time they get to high school, they're just constantly upskilling themselves and upskilling themselves.

Look, there's the days of getting an education.

May it be high school or USG is over.

We must all be lifelong learners now.

So basically cradle to grave, you have to be saying to yourself, I'm going to learn because my profession, no matter what it is, is going to be impacted by technology.

Yeah, we've been saying for a while now, people who stay at jobs for 30 years, that doesn't happen anymore and it won't be able to with what you're talking about.

No.

And what's beautiful is I think you're going to see the free market move towards education that is literally being done in a matter of minutes, a matter of hours, as opposed to being done in a matter of days, weeks and quarters.

And it's going to be really interesting how we can upskill you so quickly, and we can get into a myriad of different examples.

I'll even say forklifts.

There are forklifts now that are coming out with advanced technology that literally there are ten minute videos that allow you to upskill yourself to be prepared to use that forklift.

If you had been using the prior forklift 10 minutes, is that worth upskilling?

Absolutely.

And we put them into the position to really upskill their productivity.

There will still be jobs though, that people will need that will only be able to require people to be there, right?

I think that's the fear that people won't be around anymore.

Well, I think there's a couple of things we're going to have to do.

First, there will definitely be jobs that quote, people like interpersonal relationships are probably always going to be interpersonal, no matter how hard the humanoid wants to try to be us.

I think the second thing is, is that we need to basically get people to understand that embracing the technology is going to allow them to be able to reach levels that they never could.

Let's take a lawyer.

You've heard you're hearing so much about a junior lawyer is not going to be needed anymore.

That's hogwash.

What's going to occur is instead of the junior lawyer taking on ten cases, they're going to take on 30 cases, 40 cases, 50 cases.

They may be thinking that's that's crazy.

But in fact, with the productivity tools, that's where they're going to get to.

It's the same thing with the distribution worker, the warehouse worker who today may be expected to move 300 items.

Tomorrow might be 500 items, but all because of the fact of the productivity gains that we're going to have in technology.

And you see that at this at all levels, just about all levels.

So we've talked about this before.

Talk about transportation.

We've already seen the changes.

We have Waymo's all over the place.

You've come on and talked about air taxis.

And we certainly see the little boxes that go around and deliver food all the time.

I found one with my name on it.

It was named Donna.

I took a picture of it, but we're seeing that already.

More with transportation.

What more would we see coming up?

Look, I think you're going to see mass transit vis a vis autonomous.

So you're going to have autonomy.

If you can imagine starting, let's just use a typical corridor, the top of 400 go all the way up to Dawsonville and you'll have maybe ten autonomous busses attached to each other through NFC, near field communication.

Each one of those busses will hold maybe 20.

They're going to go down 400 at about 100 miles an hour.

The first bus will get off at Dahlonega.

The next bus will get off at Cumming.

The next bus will get off at Alpharetta.

You get my point all the way down to say, Midtown.

Imagine we didn't have to build rail and spend $1 billion.

We didn't have to get right of ways.

We're literally going to be able to provide mass transit.

But just because of the fact that we took a different application of AV, we already know that AV within our personal cars and our commercial cars, our commercial trucks, is going to be here in 5-10 years.

I believe we're going to see mass transit in that same time period.

But imagine being able to do that and be able to have mass transit do the last mile with individual pods.

It's going to be pretty cool.

We're showing the video right now, the air taxis.

And I know you've talked about them.

Is it still the plan to have the air taxi, the first one to go up during the the big FIFA soccer.

Match, the big World.

Cup, World Cup.

So we are we are imploring the federal government to give us that waiver.

We believe that having it there at World Cup, I think it's important for two reasons.

One, clearly we want to be the first state of Georgia, but two, being able to continue to to morph.

We're number 1 in business, but we want to be the most innovative state in the union.

And having us have that air taxi land first one in the country we think would put us at the top of that heat.

We're going to still wait for that real quick.

I want you to talk about farming and how it has changed.

That's the biggest that's that's our biggest industry in the state.

Agriculture.

You're seeing that the A.I.

And the robotics happening there.

It is profound when we think about the entire life cycle of agriculture.

So we're talking about crops.

For instance, let's take livestock to the side with crops.

We're talking about literally seeds all the way to harvesting.

There is not a place in that value chain where we're not seeing education make a profound difference in terms of the optimization of the seed, the hybridization of the seed pest control all the way down to water usage, and then all the way to harvesting.

I'm sure many people have seen on the show right now, they've seen literally on Twitter or any other social media.

We've seen literally robotic harvesters of nearly any crop.

So we are going to see more and more A.I., more and more machine learning, literally going into the machines and going into, I'll just say, the nanotechnology to produce the seeds that we need to optimize for our conditions.

Does this mean the, the, the farmers are going to be able to.

Well, there's still some things there's no control of, you know, and that is Mother Nature and, you know, the rain they need and those kinds of things, storms that may come through.

But can they afford some of these technology issues, the things that they may want to buy?

You hit the you hit the best point.

And you also have, you know, what I call is basically FOMO, the fear of missing out.

But you also have the fear of being too soon.

So we have farmers who are saying, look, this is a seven figure investment, and I'm hearing you that I'm seeing all this productivity, but it seems like it changes every six months.

So why don't I wait six more months before I make the seven figure investment?

Because then I'll get version two, version three, version four.

So one of the challenges that we're having in Agtech right now is how do we stop the FOMO?

How do we get that commitment made, and how does the state participate in creating that surety?

One of the things the state is talking about working with you, with UGA and all the extensions, is basically putting people in to the field to get people comfortable with the tech, get people to know how to use the tech and let them know that if they buy a version one, chances are we can help them with the upgrade to version two.

Version three, version four.

Yeah.

And you have we have UGA's Grand Farm and Perry, Georgia.

That's already doing a lot of this stuff.

Great showcase for Agtech.

And what we're looking to do next year is to literally bring the country in to show that the that the state of Georgia doesn't just lead on AG, the state of Georgia leads leads on ag tech, and the grand farm is a great way for us to show that.

Anybody who can lead us into all of this, it's you.

Your excitement about all of this.

Well, we're going to you're going to stay with us because we're going to talk more about this coming up, more on A.I.

Technology, but a greater focus on social media and how it's affecting children.

We learn what lawmakers should do to protect those children.

And the co-chair of the Special Senate Study Committee gives us perspectives.

All parents should hear.

So stay with us.

Georgia Farm Bureau a grassroots organization dedicated to preserving Georgia agriculture.

Farm Bureau advocates for all Georgia farmers at the state Capitol during the session and year round.

Georgia Farm Bureau the Voice of Georgia Farmers.

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Welcome back to Lawmakers.

I'm Donna Lowry.

We continue the focus of our show on A.I., social media and technology.

Joining us is Democratic Senator Sally Harrell of Atlanta.

She co-chaired a committee with a long name, the Senate Impact of Social Media and Artificial Intelligence on Children and Platform Privacy Protection Study Committee.

And once again with us is Representative Todd Jones, chairman of the House Committee on Technology and Infrastructure Innovation.

So thank you for joining us.

So much to talk about.

But yours is a little bit more serious.

But we want to get to it.

Your study committee with your co-chair, Senator Shawn Still, on social media and A.I., spent months and very long hours listening to testimony.

You have wanted to actually have that kind of a study committee for a while.

So tell us about it and why that was so important to you.

Yes, I had actually filed that study committee a couple of years before.

It was important to me because I saw my own children and how they responded to the smartphone and their friends.

I remember getting together with moms, and their kids had gotten early exposure to pornography and were traumatized by it.

And another mom had a kid who developed an eating disorder related to what what the child experienced on the phone.

So I knew ten years ago that these phones were going to cause problems for kids.

And I've literally been waiting for millennials to have their babies and be afraid so that we would have the numbers to do something about it.

Yeah, because they're the ones that grew up with it, and now they're realizing.

They actually did not grow up with it.

They did.

The millennials didn't know, but their kids are the ones that grew up with it.

Yes.

Yeah.

So you heard from experts in Georgia with heartbreaking stories.

And we're going to get into that a little bit.

A few who spoke either in person or remotely, were parents who lost children to social media issues.

Two Georgia dads testified about losing children to suicide.

One was the father of Manny Pargman, a freshman at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

We are going to play a portion of an interview with Manny's dad, Ben Pargman, when he testified after talking about the how Manny was, he knew he was a happy, fun loving young man.

He explains how the family didn't understand why he killed himself until police turned over his cell phone after his death.

Now a warning this is very difficult to hear, but we felt it was important to understand why legislators are looking to create laws about this issue.

On his phone were repeated searches on how to kill himself.

His notes app contained a journal on whether or not he deserved to live.

We saw the papers that he submitted in class.

Papers on the effects of social media on kids brains, how addictive it was, how hard it was to escape.

Just nine days before he killed himself, he turned in an English paper entitled The Impact of Smartphone Use on the Mental Health of Students.

The paper said, quote, smartphone dependency leads to increased issues with mental health of students.

It leads to anxiety and depression and impairs cognitive function.

Smartphones dependency is also known to make existing mental challenges worse.

This is especially so in times of crisis, and even knowing that nine days later he killed himself.

In the days from looking at his cell phone, we determined in the days before he died, he deleted and reinstalled Instagram and TikTok about a dozen times, trying and failing to pull free on the day he died, he watched 15 hours of TikTok videos before going out into the woods and hanging himself from a tree.

As I said, difficult to hear.

Yes, and the fact that he understood that what was going on with him and yet felt he couldn't get out of it, I guess.

Right.

And this is what was compelling about this testimony, is this this kid knew this kid was writing papers on this issue in, in, in school.

And that speaks to really how addictive these platforms have become.

The social media companies realize that the longer they kept people engaged on the platform, the more hours people spent on it, the more money they made selling to marketers and marketing brokers.

And so they started playing with the design of of the platform and doing things to, to make it more addictive, to make the kid not be able to disengage.

And that's what this father's son communicated is.

He tried over and over again to stop, but he couldn't do it, even knowing that it was bad for him.

Yeah, you are going to continue with your committee on all of this.

There were some recommendations.

Talk about that.

Right.

So the committee wrote a robust plan.

Action plan, a legislative plan with a number of recommendations.

We had bills this session that dealt with those recommendations.

Some of them passed and some of them didn't.

The ones that didn't pass are really the ones where the the industry brought in lobbyists to try to kill the bills.

And, and they did one in particular was called the App Store Accountability Act.

That made it easier for parents to be able to control what their kids had access to.

They would be able to enter the child's birth date into the phone, and then the apps wouldn't be able to be downloaded by a child until a parent approved the download.

That did not pass that there was actually no vote taken on it.

And then my bill, Senate Bill 495, got to the heart of design.

It actually put guardrails on some of the addictive design features that the companies are are using and said, you can't you can't have that addictive design.

You can't use that if if there's a miner on your plate, if miners are on your platform.

We had a hearing for that bill, but no vote was taken.

Then, because the Republican caucus decided to take this issue on as one of their priorities, the majority leader did bring a bill that puts some Senate bill 540, that puts some guardrails on companion chat bots that kids use ensuring that these companion chat bots don't interact with a child in a sexually explicit way or a way that promotes emotional dependency and has some disclaimers telling the child this is not actually a human.

That bill did pass the Senate floor and will be going to Representative Jones committee in the House.

Okay.

But the thing is, this is not a one off.

Your committee is not a one off.

You're going to continue with it.

The all the states that I've worked with that have made progress in this area.

It's been a three or four year effort.

We had a bill in the Senate today that was about removing abandoned vessels from our waterways.

And that author got up and said that that bill took four years.

So it's not unusual for big issues like this to take a number of years.

We're just happy that we have something moving this year and that it's been a a topic of conversation.

Yeah, I know there's so much more to talk about.

And I wanted to talk to you about some medical things, and I don't think we're going to get into a lot, except that I have to have you tell me you think robots will actually be able to take blood from people.

At one point?

Donna, I can guarantee it because it's happening in the EU right now and it's pretty amazing.

It's basically the person sits down, they put their arm in, like you see at maybe a CVS or Walgreens drugstore, and literally everything gets done.

But what's amazing, they're using imaging to find the right vein.

So they tap into the correct vein and look, it's happening.

It's already happening.

And we're looking forward to the FDA approving it here in the United States.

We never have enough time to talk about all of this.

But the good thing is you guys continue to do it.

The legislation is important.

You guys have to just keep up with it, right?

Absolutely.

And for us, it's about guardrails.

We know that it's the private sector that's going to drive the innovation.

It's up to us to put the guardrails around them.

So in our mind we saw massive innovation in the third industrial revolution.

We're going to see it even bigger in the fifth industrial revolution.

But I think what's going to be most important is our partnership with we're in the guardrails.

Private private sector will do that.

Innovation okay.

Unfortunately we're out of time.

Thank you so much for coming, both of you.

I appreciate all of this.

That does it for Lawmakers today.

The legislature will take care of committee work tomorrow.

Much of it is in the Senate.

Getting a first look at that budget passed in the House.

We'll see you on Thursday.

Have a good evening.