Pushing E-Bike Safety Regulations and AI Safeguards

0:00 Speaker 1 Sunday morning. Well, what’s going on in our city? We love our city. We love our state. And we’re worried about our city and our state. We don’t want anybody to move out. I don’t want anybody to move out.

0:12 And with us today is one of the most powerful people in our city, Julie Menon. And Julie Menon is the Speaker of the City Council who has a lot of things to say about things. Well, Speaker Menon, Thank you for coming on this Sunday morning. And I have a whole list of things to talk about. And let’s start.

0:36 Every time I cross the street, I take my life in my hands. You know, these motorcycles, these bicycles, they’re going 40 miles an hour, 50 miles an hour. And I don’t know sometimes if they’re coming from the left or coming from the right. What is the city council thinking about?

0:54 Speaker 2 Well, John, first of all, thanks so much for having me on today. Great to be with you. This is an issue that we hear from all the time. And that’s why just recently the city council had a hearing on e-bikes. We are hearing and introduced 23 different city council bills to get to the issue. So basically more

1:15 than two dozen people have tragically died in crashes involving e-bikes and scooters in the city this year alone. So this is an urgent safety issue, and that is why we are acting. We want to pass a bill to ban certain of these e-bikes, the so-called Class 3 e-bikes that can, as you say, go at very high speeds,

1:37 because we do not want those bikes to be lawfully sold in New York City. So we’re going to ban those. We have a bill to license and regulate the third-party apps, so that Uber Eats and DoorDash Because right now we can’t have a situation where drivers are going on the sidewalk or speeding. And so we want to make sure

1:58 that we license those apps and so we’re regulating them. And then we have many, many other bills to really approach issues. And then we need more enforcement. So we heard from the NYPD and the Department of Transportation because we pressed both of those agencies to say, look, we need more enforcement.

2:16 Speaker 1 Well, Speaker Manning, One of the other important things is if they kill somebody or send somebody to the hospital, do they have insurance?

2:26 Speaker 2 Well, I’m glad you asked that, John, because one of our bills requires insurance because that is exactly right. We can’t have a situation where people do not have insurance. So insurance is one of the bills that we are looking to pass because we, again, want to make sure that the people are insured. The other thing that we’re

2:45 looking to do is also around city bikes. Right now, you are supposed to be over 16 to ride a city bike, but they have no age verification system. So I urge the DOT commissioner back over the summer to employ an age verification system. And so now we’re actually going to do a city council bill to mandate an

3:06 age verification system, because I say this as a mother, I remember when my boys were teenagers and they were riding those city bikes. And, you know, when they were young, you don’t want that to happen. And we’ve really got to make sure that we are protecting young people here.

3:20 Speaker 1 Well, are the people that own the city bikes responsible for the insurance on those at least?

3:29 Speaker 2 So that’s Lyft. So Lyft now is in control of city bike. And one of the things that we’ve been discussing with Lyft is to really make sure that they’re putting in place rules around this. So that includes the insurance around it. That includes making sure that they’re doing an age verification system so that young teenagers are not

3:47 riding it. We also had an incident recently where two young girls were on the bike together and one of them tragically died. You can’t have two people riding the bike. So we are in discussions with Lyft about that. There are all these things that we need them to do to make sure that City Bike is operating in a

4:05 safe manner.

4:07 Speaker 1 Now, you have one of the most important jobs in our city. And tell us what else is on your mind this Sunday morning.

4:18 Speaker 2 So one of the things, John, that we’re working on is around artificial intelligence. Look, we are thrilled that New York City is the tech capital of the world. We’ve got about 400,000 jobs in tech in our great city.

4:31 We’re actually beating San Francisco. That’s great. We want tech startups to incubate here. I represent the East Side and Roosevelt Island, which includes Cornell Technion, where we’re incubating all sorts of incredible tech startups that are doing medical and scientific breakthroughs, and we want to encourage that. But at the same time, in the past month, there have been

4:52 some really concerning safety warnings about rogue AI agents breaking free of what their responsibilities were supposed to be, so the hygiene-based incident or breaking into the government side of Australia, or even here in the United States, breaking into some government sites. And so we want to have responsible regulation that does not cycle innovation. So we held a hearing.

5:17 We heard from all the major frontier AI companies. We heard from safety experts and whistleblowers. And I think we’ve got some really great deals on the table that would, for example, require third-party validation. So rather than have the AI companies self-regulate, we would have third-party validators who could then validate the safety of the new models. And if

5:39 you think about it, John, in the pharmaceutical industry, they don’t self-regulate. They have the FDA. Financial firms don’t regulate. They have the SEC. So we wanted to have responsible regulation, but one that does not cycle innovation.

5:52 Speaker 1 Speaker Menden, I had lunch a couple days ago, and the fact is, by the way, I understand they’re calling it superintelligence now. because I’m not sure there’s anything such a thing as artificial intelligence. But I did a one-minute piece on superintelligence or artificial intelligence, and I’m going to send it to you. And in some of the states,

6:19 what they’re saying, what the governors of the states are saying is, is if you add something that requires whatever, 100 zillion watts or something, then you have to provide new power to be able to cover that 100 and not depend on the citizens of the city or the state to provide it. Are you guys, is the city

6:44 doing similar things to that?

6:47 Speaker 2 Well, so the state is working on that. The state has some rules around data centers and what is required on that. For the city, what we are really focused on is the responsible use of AI. And so certainly where we know what’s coming around the corner, which is recursive self-improvement, where It’s a process in which AI systems

7:11 are actually enhancing at such a degree that they are almost creating and self-propagating themselves. So this is an area where humans, not to sound cataclysmic, could actually lose control of the AI. And that’s what we heard time and time again from the safety experts that are hearing. So we’re focused on trying to make sure, since these companies

7:35 are located in the city, that and employ thousands and thousands of people, that we have responsible regulations. But certainly on the power front and the electricity front, that is something that the state regulates, and so we look forward to working with them on that.

7:53 Speaker 1 Understood. Well, anything else you want to tell the New Yorkers and the American people in general?

8:00 Speaker 2 Yeah, well, absolutely. We have been very busy at the city council. We are focused on a number of different issues. One of them, I think, really affects an issue that every New Yorker cares about, which is our educational system.

8:14 As you know, John, you and I have talked about it. I have been very focused on getting the Department of Education contracts. The DOE is a $ 40 billion agency, and they’re spending about $ 13 billion on outside consultants. So for some time, we had asked the Department of Education to give us the contracts. so that through our oversight function

8:36 we could really review them and see where there’s waste and efficiency and duplication of that person. So now we have those contracts. So soon we will be releasing our results of that review. And, again, I think that’s a real opportunity for us to find savings and efficiencies in what is really the largest city agency that we have,

9:00 a $ 40 billion agency. So we’re eager to find these efforts to find those efficiencies on the consulting contract.

9:08 Speaker 1 Thank you so much for coming on this Sunday morning and help make our city survive.

9:15 Speaker 2 Thanks, John. Great to be with you.