Naveed Hasan calls for pro-social municipal technology governance

Thank you, Speaker Menon, Technology Committee Chair De La Rosa, and City Council for holding this critical hearing.

My name is Naveed Hassan, and I'm the parent of two public school children and also the elected Manhattan member on the panel for educational policy.

My academic and professional background is in symbolic pre-generative AI and computer vision.

We are in an unfortunate situation in technology policy for generative AI with two prominent camps.

The accelerationists appeal to a desire for imminent utopia and the effect of altruists spending their time in, in quote, panic.

Neither extreme greed nor extreme fear are a beneficial framing for sober thinking around how to manage developing advanced technologies.

New Yorkers need pro-social technology governance with tech expertise in public offices, not being rushed to build hundreds of hyperscale data centers, or putting only those very companies in the room when writing rules in a way that lets them achieve regulatory capture.

This morning, none of the Gen AI companies could answer a simple question.

What do you consider is the risk of your service causing catastrophe to humanity?

This is because it is antithetical to their business desire to push an inherently probabilistic product to be used in all aspects of work and make any such estimates.

When a job demands deterministic certainty, this whole model will eventually fail for sure.

We must not allow the spread of an unfit-for-purpose technology to be misused so broadly.

There's bipartisan interest in not just regulating Gen AI, but also pulling into the public realm broadband and wireless connectivity, abusive algorithms.

targeting, illegal surveillance, vendor lock-in, interoperability mandates, open standards, open source software infrastructure, and more.

We have the opportunity now to think about what municipal tech policy should look like for the good of everyone living in New York.

We have the ability already to enforce existing rules around antitrust, concentration of risk,

controlled goods rules being applied to compute hardware.

Let us calmly and expeditiously use skilled public servants to build a future with beneficial technology available for all of society.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for your testimony.

Up next, we have Nadira Pittman.

Nadira, if you are on, please unmute and begin.