Oh no, the colour.

And I will hand it over to staff.

Welcome.

Great.

Good morning, uh Mayor, members of the council, Mark Whittenberg, I'm the chief information officer for the city.

And welcome.

We're going to be talking about artificial intelligence.

This is going to be an overview.

This is a really deep subject, so I just want you to know this is going to be an overview of a little bit of an introduction of what artificial intelligence is, what we're doing to prepare at the city of Raleigh, some of our current and planned use cases around AI, along with developing technologies and innovation that we're seeing in the field.

And then what's next for us?

First, a little bit of level setting.

So what is artificial intelligence?

First of all, I want to start off with any of you trivia buffs.

Artificial intelligence has been around since 1956.

Actually started at a conference where several computer scientists got together and they coined the phrase artificial intelligence.

But you can think of artificial intelligence as like this big overarching subject with these other areas down below.

So at its core or at its foundation, artificial intelligence is like a very smart assistant that can look at a vast amount of data, perform calculations on that data, and then provide results.

Or you can stand at an intersection and physically count the vehicles.

What we were able to do is we were able to train the system to look at the video and to be able to understand the differences between like a truck, a car, a pedestrian, or a bicyclist.

And then we were able to take it one step further and start to look at the lanes and understand churning movements, the situation in the intersection.

Transportation takes all that information, and now that instead of just a point in time, they can look at this over a vast amount of time to be able to make intersection changes, like adding a right turn lane to improve intersection safety.

The last piece is deep learning.

So deep learning is what you've all been hearing about in the news.

This is the generative AI.

So when you hear about chat GPT, Gemini, large language models, that fits into the deep learning section of artificial intelligence.

For the remainder of the presentation, this is what we're going to focus on because this is the latest, the coolest thing that you're all hearing about.

But I just wanted you to be aware that we've been doing artificial intelligence at the city for quite a while.

So what are the impacts?

Gartner, who's a research firm, is actually calling this like a new age or the age of cyber physical systems.

I don't even begin to like understand exactly what that means.

But for you all, it means that it's transformative.

Kind of like the industrial age, we went from steam engines to combustion.

It's kind of the same thing.

We're going from the information age to this age where computers are just much faster and able to do much more because we have that capability or the speed.

So we're seeing impacts in productivity.

For example, uh Lou actually asked me for an abstract for this presentation, and he needed it by noon.

I took the presentation and all the backup material, fed it into chat GPT, and it produced the abstract that you see in your information.

I was able to do that very quickly, but the key is to look it over, make sure that you're you're the humans looking over that.

But we're seeing examples in productivity.

The job market, just like any other uh industrial revolution, the job market is going to have some impact uh in the jobs that we're doing.

We want to make sure that we're upskilling our employees and that we're providing training for those employees.

But there are definitely going to be impacts to the job market, and we're seeing this transformational period.

I kind of like in artificial intelligence to what the calculator did to the slide rule, right?

Think of it as this new tool that's available to help you do your job better.

The economic development piece of it, there's definitely opportunity in the research triangle.

We're seeing companies that are using artificial intelligence to be able to come to market much quicker.

We're seeing opportunities in startups and entrepreneurs that are diving into this artificial intelligence and providing systems.

And then the last impact is uh environmental.

I mentioned that computers, it's a lot of computing power.

Uh saw a report that some of the big companies like Microsoft and Google are using anywhere from 30% to 50% more power.

And Microsoft is actually going to be purchasing some of the power from Three Mile Island and restarting three mile island.

Uh may sound a little scary, but again, they're trying to figure out how to be carbon neutral in providing this computing power.

So, what are some of the challenges and the risks and the threats around artificial intelligence?

Well, bad actors.

When we think about bad actors, let's think about the good actors first.

We're all thinking, how do we do this in an ethical and responsible manner?

Think about the bad actors.

Do you think they're thinking about the same thing?

Do you think that the criminals are thinking, wow, I need to make sure that I'm ethical about this?

Probably not.