Speak With the Speaker: AI Accountability, Synagogue Protests, and 9/11 Air Quality Records

Brian Lehrer (0:10)

It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We begin today with the September edition of our monthly series Speak with the Speaker. It's my questions and yours for New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin. You can start calling or texting your questions now at 212-433. WNYC, call or text 212-433-9692.

We'll do our latest Ask the Mayor with Mayor Mamdani later in the month. Today, it's Speak with the Speaker. And today, the Speaker comes with news that relates to the special edition we did of this show yesterday, coincidentally, on the issue of AI. The Speaker has just announced that she will convene all 51 members of the City Council on Monday, October 5th, for what they call a Committee of the Whole hearing. If it's your first time hearing that phrase, Committee of the Whole, that's W-H-O-L-E. Consider this a New York City civics lesson. It's a format essentially reserved for matters the council considers existential. And so the subject, yes, artificial intelligence. How many times did we use that word existential in yesterday's special hour? Menin has sent letters now to Dario Amadei of Anthropic who we played clips of and talked about centrally yesterday. And Sam Altman of Open AI saying she expects them to appear and answer questions about what safeguards, if any, stand between their products and the public. Her press release cites that Anthropic researcher who recently resigned, saying the technology could kill us all. How's that for existential? By the end of the decade, and a reported incident in July, that we've talked about here a couple of times, which Open AI's own test agents went rogue and hacked another company something its human programmers did not ask it to do in pursuit of a goal the humans didn't even set. So a city legislature with no jurisdiction officially over a technology being built in California, and regulated or not regulated in Washington, is summoning two CEOs to City Hall. We will ask Speaker Menin what she thinks she and City Council can do about that. We'll talk about other things too. As we talk between anniversaries, 25 years since September 11th, 15 years in a few weeks since Occupy Wall Street, Menin has a personal connection to both. Again, it's my questions and yours for Speaker Menin at 212-433-WNYC.

Call or text 212-433-9692.

Speaker Menin, we always appreciate that you do this. Welcome back to WNYC.

Julie Menin (2:57)

Thank you, Brian. So great to be with you again.

Brian Lehrer (2:59)

All right, AI, October 5th. A committee of the whole, which almost never happens. What made artificial intelligence a thing that warrants it?

Julie Menin (3:10)

Well, we're obviously all aware of the recent reports of the warnings that whether it's Jacob Coxon, the engineer from Anthropic who sounded really a clarion call warning or whether it's other safety experts who have for quite some time warned about some significant risks that are posed by AI. We really want to get into what those risks are and what type of responsible guard rails we can do as a major legislative body.

No one is arguing that they're not important uses of AI. We know that AI has done some incredible work in terms of healthcare and scientific breakthroughs in terms of helping businesses. But at the same time, there is a responsibility that we have as government to ensure that we are addressing some significant safety risks and certainly that we are addressing the potential of a catastrophic scenario.

We saw what happened with rogue AI agents, as you mentioned, which I want to point out was actually done during a safety test. It's not as if the agents went rogue at another time. They were actually conducting a safety test when the AI agents decided to act in that nefarious way and go outside of these controlled lab experiments. I think we as government have a real responsibility to act. And so the point of this committee of the whole legislative hearing, we're going to hear from AI experts all around the country. We're going to hear from these major AI companies. We want to hear from the general public, and we're going to utilize that information to enact responsible legislative guardrails. And I think we have a lot of interesting novel legislative ideas that we are looking at currently.

Brian Lehrer (5:05)

Can you give me some examples? Because as I asked in the intro, what can a city council do about a technology built in California, a whole country away, and regulated or not regulated in Washington?

Julie Menin (5:19)

Well, Brian, I will say this. I've been a regulatory attorney for many, many years. It's how I started my career in Washington, DC., working as a regulatory attorney at a large firm, and then at a large Fortune 500 company in New York. That, and I formerly served as commissioner of the Department of Consumer Affairs. There are many ways the city of New York can legislate on this public safety issue. We have a responsibility to play a significant role in the public safety, health, and welfare of over 8.5 million residents of the city.