- We're now joined by Dr. Beth Simone Noveck, who's the Chief Innovation Officer in the state of New Jersey.

Good to see you, doctor.

- Hi, nice to be back.

- Great to have you back.

Also, I wanna make it clear that you were the former, the first deputy chief technology officer in the White House during the Obama administration, 2009, 2011.

Beth, let me ask you something.

There's a task force that has been put together in the state of New Jersey.

Governor Murphy signed an executive order for this AI, Artificial Intelligence Task Force.

What is it?

And how will we know a year from now how effective it's been?

- So the task force is set up really to address how we can take advantage in New Jersey of both the tremendous benefits from these powerful new technologies surrounding AI, and also how we can mitigate the risks.

So we're bringing together leaders from all across government, economic development, labor, education, all across the government, to really address what we should be doing in the state of New Jersey especially to realize those benefits.

And we're starting to meet already.

We have working groups that are focused on issues like jobs of the future, and how we build the innovation economy around AI in New Jersey, how we promote literacy and equity, but also how we safeguard security and privacy.

So we're addressing a whole range of issues and meeting already.

And we're gonna work pretty quickly to try to come up with recommendations over the course of the coming months, and in the next year to really address what we should do.

And, again, it's a very fast-moving set of technologies.

There's obviously other governments looking at this, also, in Washington.

And we understand what we need to do in New Jersey to safeguard our residents and realize the benefits.

- Beth, let me try this.

I'm a student of leadership and you cannot separate innovation.

The greatest leaders are always innovators, and thinking what's next?

And I always like to call it connecting the dots and trying to strategically and intentionally be where you need to be.

There's a question here.

So for those who are just freaked out, like, that AI, artificial intelligence, like, I can't talk about it.

I can't think about it.

It's gonna take my job.

Okay, and we were just joking here with our great camera operator, Scarlyn, about who's gonna take his job, who's gonna take my job?

We can obsess over that, or we can embrace it, but what does it actually mean from your point of view, Beth, to embrace AI when there are so many unknowns?

And we are afraid of losing our jobs.

Help us.

- Look, with very good reason, I don't think we should be afraid, but we should be mindful and we should be critical.

And we should be asking ourselves, what do these mean for us?

I would suggest, first and foremost, you should turn off the news and go ask your 13-year-old to help you try these tools for yourself.

I think when you sit down with them, whether it's a Google Bard, or OpenAI's ChatGPT, or whether it's Anthropic's Claude, or one of these other so-called generative AI tools that are now freely available and easily accessible to us.

When you try them, you begin to realize the power of what they can do in terms of the ability to create new kinds of content, to analyze content, but don't forget, AI is already all around us, even without you trying any of these new tools with your kids.

- Example.

- Siri, I better not say her name out loud.

She's gonna start talking to me in a second.

- Siri is AI.

- Of course, she's AI.

So is my Alexa is AI.

When I go onto Google Translate to translate that letter I'm gonna write to my relatives in the home country, that's AI.

When I'm typing on my computer and it autocorrects my spelling because I mistyped in some way, didn't get that I before E except after C. That's AI doing the work.

So AI has been with us for a long time.

When you mail a letter through the post office in your, you know, my chicken scrawl, because I'm so used to typing at a computer, I can barely write by hand.

Thank goodness there's some AI in use in the post office that's actually using computer vision to scan what I've written and translate that into something a machine can understand and route my letter to the right place.

So it's already all around us.

If you're on Duolingo learning French or Spanish, for example, or another language, it's gonna personalize those lessons for you.

All of that is AI.

It's around us, we should try it.

And familiarize ourselves both with the benefits.

And then we can also talk about what are the risks and what are the dangers in sober conversation.

- And I wanna talk about those risks in this way.

The one thing that got not just my attention, but countless others in the state of New Jersey and the region and the nation.

This case in Westfield High School.

I mean, this incident in Westfield High School where a group of students used AI, artificial intelligence, to fake pornographic images of certain girls in the school.

I mean, how is a school system supposed to deal with that, A?

And what do we say to parents of those children and those children themselves?

Those girls who were victimized and bullied in ways that I can't even comprehend or imagine, like, that's AI.

- Look, without speaking to this specific case, because obviously it's an ongoing situation.

The school is trying to decide what they're doing, law enforcement.

- There's litigation.

There's a court case, yes.

- So without speaking to the details of this particular case, I think it's a great example of where on the one hand we have powerful tools for doing things like creating images more easily.

With those images I can, you know, make better pictures for my book report.

If you've maybe seen David Beckham's campaign against malaria on YouTube, he's talking in 10 languages.

That is what you might call a deepfake in the sense that that's not David AI, I'm sorry, David AI.

That is David Beckham.

It's not David Beckham speaking in Spanish or Russian or Chinese.

That is AI helping to do that.

Training videos that we make to educate people about AI.

We use AI to make it faster and easier to create those.

So, again, positive uses for those tools, but obviously negative uses in the same way that we've seen people using Photoshop over the last generation to create fake images, create fake content.

We're gonna see that both in the educational context, in the election context, and other contexts where we're deeply worried about that.

And that's why we have to think about how do we safeguard the positive and beneficial uses, those creating pictures for my book report, and prevent against those harms?

And in many cases, we have laws that already exist to protect us, but in many cases, jurisdictions are enacting new policies.

And that's why we've created this task force to try to address exactly those questions and separate out the panic from the reality and figure out what are the things we need to do in New Jersey.

- Beth, we had a minute left, but I'm curious about this.

Is it fair to say that regardless of what the task force concludes, that there's got to be more aggressive, more timely, more relevant government regulation and involvement as it relates to AI?

Regardless of what that is, the status quo is not gonna protect people enough.

Is that a fair assessment?

- Look, we're seeing that the world over with actions already being taken in Washington, an executive order that came out of the White House on AI, that's 20,000 words on this topic.

The EU that's just enacted regulation around AI.

- The European Union, right.

- Everybody recognizes we have to act, but we have to act carefully and thoughtfully, even as we're needing to re-engineer the plane while we're flying it.

These tools are still evolving and that's why we have already enacted interim guidance, for example, in New Jersey.

We're not saying it's the last word, but it's the first word on what we need to do right now to ensure, for example, that we're using these tools for good in this state.

That we're using them to deliver better services to residents, and ensure at the same time that we're not doing things like misusing personal identifiable information, safeguarding people's privacy, et cetera.

So lots of great stories to tell about the benefits.

And we have to keep an eye on this and stay vigilant.

- And AI ain't going away.

That's one thing we know for sure.

And you just listened to Dr. Beth Simone Noveck, who's the Chief Innovation Officer of the great state of New Jersey.

Thank you so much, Beth, we appreciate it.

- Thanks for having me, I appreciate it.

- And we appreciate you watching.

We'll see you next time.

- [Narrator] Think Tank with Steve Adubato has been a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

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