As AI continues to leech onto everything that makes us human and RAM prices continue to spike, the local government has seen the advancements in Artificial intelligence as an opportunity.
Mayor Craig Greenberg recently announced that the metro government would be adding a new “Office of Artificial Intelligence” led by the new Chief AI Officer, Pamela McKnight. The current ‘pilot’ objective of this office is to speed up the process of obtaining building permits, but there will be more goals in the future.
According to the bio on the official Office of AI website, Pamela McKnight has over 25 years of experience, primarily at Intel, where she was a technical program manager who focused on AI adoption. In short, she tried to sell the idea of AI to Intel employees. Importantly, her bio states that she firmly believes “that every person has inherent value” despite being in charge of an office that attempts to redirect human roles to machinery. McKnight seems to be an expert in classic tech company corporate jargon, where they never fully explain what they really do. For example, On LinkedIn, McKnight wrote that her new role “is to champion human-centric solutions that empower employees.” What does that really mean?
The Q&A section of the AI Office website has numerous answers that I am both glad and disgusted to hear. Luckily, this is an experiment; it may not stick around, and nobody will be replaced by AI—yet. The part of the Q&A that is a little scary is answering the question regarding the trustworthiness of AI: An intentionally random, hallucination-prone, easily-manipulated program. The response to this concern is “No.”
A whole other can of worms is opened when looking into the company creating the AI itself, Govstream.ai. A Washington-based startup backed by venture capitalists with little to no history. The company’s entire goal is to speed up the permitting process for cities, and mockups on the website show it mimicking a basic AI chatbot conversation. Their website lacks any originality, mimicking the recent trends in AI company branding such as gradients, sans-serifs, and AI generated images. While it’s unlikely that govstream.ai is doing anything shady, there is a worrying lack of proof of concept.
It feels as if the metro government was sold really hard on the idea of AI, probably by someone from Govstream, and along the way found McKnight to run this operation. According to posts from both Govstream and Louisville, our government was very cautious before approving this initiative, and the pilot will only last for 3-6 months, so I’ll give them that. Despite that, it can’t be ignored that the local government is putting trust into a machine that is famous for getting things wrong. It may only be a matter of time before a shaky building or structure is made because the AI let them off the hook. Perhaps they can ask ChatGPT how to get rid of the rubble.
