Deputy Speaker Williams questions Comptroller on AI task force and economic disruption

So first up, we have our deputy speaker, followed by our majority whip.

Thank you.

Hi.

Nice to see you again.

So I actually passed a bill that required the city to establish a task force to review and report on AI's impact.

Do not know the status.

I literally have texted in our compliance division to follow up because I've been asking them for the status of this bill because it would essentially, it tasked the city to create a task force to really look into a whole wide range

of things, workforce impacts.

All of the things.

How is AI going to impact the city?

So your report warns that AI would significantly impact employment wages and city tax revenues.

So what specific steps do you think we should take?

To ensure that AI-driven productivity gains translate into broadly shared economic benefits rather than deeper inequality.

Thank you for leading and issuing that legislation.

It's an important report.

We'd love to help make sure that

that the task force comes together and love to be part of it if appropriate.

Yeah, I was going to say, you should be a part of it.

I don't know if the, I have to check to see if the bill requires, you know, these task forces, sometimes we require different citywide to appoint someone.

So we'll have to see.

Absolutely.

I'm really worried about the economic disruption.

I'm worried about the job disruption.

The chair asked about a historical perspective, and the city lost a million jobs in deindustrialization.

It happened over 40 years, though.

And as painful as it was, there was more time to adapt.

And while we don't know precisely where we're headed on AI, we could lose jobs much more quickly.

And we need to be there to support people for that.

It's hard as a city because so much of the leadership we need has to come from the national government.

And we're not getting that right now.

But I would absolutely support plans to give the American people ownership stakes in some of the companies that stand to make trillions of dollars from this technology.

I support ways to ensure that no one's left behind right now.

And we'll potentially need new economic models to do that.

I've asked what can we do as a city.

And we have some ability to support people who lose their jobs, maybe by some limited income assistance, perhaps by retraining.

We have none of that in the budget right now.

And

when I see that we're already running a gap and we have very little money in our reserves, if this hits in six months or 18 months, I'm worried that we're not going to be ready to respond quickly enough.

So in the report, what I called for is let's start building up our reserves.

Let's add AI disruption in addition to natural disasters and other things to the list of uses and be ready so that if we have 100,000 people unemployed, we can help support them economically, we can help retrain them, and so much more.

Yes, I love that response.

And if my memory serves me correctly, DCAS had testified and said that they're like,

somewhat working on this it wasn't clear so I'm still very interested in what internal assessments they're doing to

make a determination maybe some city employees need to be reskilled or upskilled to maintain their job and that just not hasn't been clear to me so your report

also suggests that the city, as you mentioned, should roughly double its reserves.