JB Pritzker’s frightening theory about AI and jobs | Decoder

0:00- It's here. It's not going to stop. We're not going to become Luddites and there's not gonna be any AI. This idea that, you know, the president has and David Sacks, you know, where they got all the companies together and said, "Hey, how about you guys self-police?" You know, that's not gonna work, at least not for protecting people's privacy.

0:20- Do you think data centers and the pushback on data centers is an effective route towards AI regulation? - I don't. I think it's an effective route toward data center regulation. - Will you convince me? I'm 46. I'm announcing my run for president here with you, Governor. - Listen, I would vote for you in a second

0:38if the choice was you and Donald Trump. - A low bar, but I'm glad I crossed it. (upbeat music) Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, who has a lot of thoughts about AI, tech, and privacy.

0:55If you've been listening to the show, you know that one of my running theories is that those issues are driving a big and maybe unexpected political realignment. And with the midterms coming up next month, early voting already underway in a lot of places, the stakes for that realignment are pretty high right now. So I asked Governor Pritzker,

1:11who is currently running for reelection about all of that, and he was surprisingly willing to dive right into the weeds of what government is even for. You'll hear him say, and it's hard to disagree, that some problems are just collective action problems that require the government to do a lot of work. We can't solve all these problems one at a time

1:28or even one state at a time. It's a pretty deep conversation and we got into it on a lot of issues. And of course, I had to ask him if the Bears are gonna stay in Illinois. Before we get going, do me a favor and subscribe to Decoder on YouTube where we put out new episodes every Monday and Thursday.

1:42Governor JB Pritzker, you're the governor of Illinois. Welcome to Decoder. - Thanks, Nilay. Great to be with you. - I am very excited to talk to you. We're in the heart of midterm season. You are running for reelection. I have to tell you, I have to be very honest with you, I personally feel a lot of pressure in this interview,

1:57not only because I'm speaking to a governor, but I went to school in Chicago. My sister still lives in Chicago. My wife grew up in Illinois. Her entire family is farmers in North Central Illinois. Boy, do I have a list of questions for you. I gotta do a good job here. - Well, we're claiming you. Now that I know all that, we're claiming you.

2:13You're an Illinoisan. - I don't want that. I grew up in Wisconsin. Here's my first question for you.

2:17I'm a diehard Packers fan. Are you gonna let the Bears move to Indiana? - That is not our intention. We are in fact in discussions with the Bears and the NFL about keeping the Bears either in Chicago or in Arlington Heights, but in Illinois. - I'm saying as a Packers fan, nothing funnier than the outcome of the Bears

2:34moving to Indiana. I just wanna put that out there. Openly biased in this case, I own two shares of that stock, but I'm gonna make the comparison here. And the reason I started there is not only because I think that's a funny outcome, although I do, but it feels like we are in the middle of a generational political realignment.

2:51I'm sure you feel that in this election campaign, the idea of big business and how that should interact with the government and how the government should be able to push back on big business and not give in to big business. All of that feels up for grabs. And the comparison I will make in this specific case is your fellow governor, Gavin Newsom in California,

3:11they sued the Ellison family, Paramount, over the Warner Brothers merger. Paramount threatened to leave, right? They made a lot of noise about Nashville or Texas or Miami or wherever you make noise about these days. And it feels like Newsom caved. It feels like he pressured his Attorney General, Rob Bonta, to settle that lawsuit, keep them there. They settled the lawsuit.

3:28The next day, the Ellison family is like, "We're from California. We would never leave." I see a parallel here with the Bears that is connected to that larger realignment about how government and business should interact. Do you see that parallel? Do you feel that realignment? - Well, what I can tell you is we're pretty tough negotiators in Chicago and Illinois,

3:47and that's really what we're in the midst of now with the Bears. But I understand your point about realignment. I mean, there is a generational change, and I think it's also an attitudinal change about protecting taxpayers, protecting people who frankly are among the most vulnerable to all the technology that's overtaking people's lives

4:12and invading people's homes. I do believe that government has to be more active now and become a fighter for our people and not just a collaborator with business on everything. And so I'm a businessman, as you know, before I became governor,

4:32but I also know that the people of Illinois anyway, my job is to protect the working people of this state who often don't have anybody protecting them except a government that will stand up for them. That's kind of the realignment that I see. And that generational shift, I agree with you, it's partly a Democratic Party generational shift.

4:53Generationally, we're a little more aggressive. And I'm probably older than the next generation that's already possibly taking office this November. I'm 61 years old, but I think of myself anyway, having come out of the tech world and as somebody who has been a fighter for progressive values that yeah, we gotta become more aggressive

5:15and make sure we're standing up for our people. - There are two places where I see the realignment in particular. One is data centers, one is privacy, and you just see that as a bipartisan backlash to those things. I would actually add a third, which is antitrust broadly. It's weird if you go into Silicon Valley, David Sacks lately is retweeting Lina Khan

5:37from the Biden administration talking about whether the AI industry needs an antitrust exemption to manage safety. And they both agree that these companies don't need antitrust exemptions. They actually should be more competitive. I'm, again, putting that in the context of regulating these companies, thinking about the dynamic between the government and the biggest companies in the world.

5:57I'll just ask the question, I guess more directly. Do you think Newsom was right to give in to Paramount or do you think he should have made them make good on that threat to leave? - I can't speak to the Paramount situation well enough to give you an answer, so it would be unfair for me to do so.

6:14I can say once again that our orientation today, and I think about the big AI companies and the big social media companies as well, our orientation really has to be like, wait a minute, too much power in too few hands. And particularly when we talk about AI where it's potentially existential,

6:35but certainly transformative is probably a kind way to say it about the economy, that we're gonna have to get very engaged. Guardrails, of course, on both parts, but also addressing what I think on the AI front is potentially a significant change in employment in the United States.

6:56I'm not somebody who necessarily is convinced that we have to see a whole bunch of job loss, but that does feel like that's the direction this is going. And so what I'm suggesting is we better be prepared and we better be protecting people who are going to lose their jobs,

7:18or at least it appears they're gonna lose their jobs. If these days 4% unemployment is kind of the acceptable near full employment number, I think the problem we're gonna see is if that's sort of the level that we're gonna hopefully aim for and stay at, the problem may be that in very short order, we could end up at 7% and have that be the baseline

7:41and maybe 10%. And if you think about what's happened, you know, the upheavals of economies and of governments when you get to 10% unemployment in any country, we better be focused on how we're gonna give people the dignity of work and enough income so that they can make a life for themselves

8:02when you're gonna put people out of work by virtue of this technology. By the way, much of the benefit of that is gonna go to a very, very few people. So we've gotta wrestle with that and come to a conclusion. - I wanted to start with some of the brinksmanship we have seen in the negotiations between particularly states and the big companies,

8:24because that brinksmanship is real.

8:25The threat is, we will leave. We just covered, I don't know, Kevin O'Leary in Utah talking about data centers, and the people of Utah really pushed back against Kevin O'Leary building a data center. But his argument was, "Well, I'm just gonna shop around." This is what states do. They compete with tax incentives and benefits, maybe for data centers which will put everyone out of a job.

8:45They compete for land use rights. You've got a rural state with a lot of farms in it. How are you thinking about that dynamic? Do you feel like you're in competition with the other states or is this bipartisan realignment creating more of a level playing ground where these companies are gonna have to actually give something? - We are in competition. We just are.

9:04Because it isn't bipartisan, at least if you ask me. Unless there is a change in the government, I'll pick on Texas for a second, and there is a chance that you'll see a new governor in Texas as of November 3rd. In fact, a good chance. But if you look at Texas as it's run today by now a three-term,

9:23hoping to be a four-term Republican governor and a Republican legislature, they have no intention of changing their alignment about incentives. In the state of Illinois, we don't want to have to do that. I mean, we obviously wanna protect the revenue that we've got for the state to pay for the things we think are valuable to our people,

9:43but we also wanna make sure that we're attracting jobs and not losing jobs. And in a world where South Carolina, Michigan, Texas, Florida, pick your poison. Michigan may be slightly different just 'cause it's got democratic control, but these are our competitors. I mean, when I'm competing to have a company move to Illinois,

10:05you know, I've gotta make sure, first of all, that I'm somewhere in the ballpark when it comes to the incentives, 'cause otherwise we don't even get considered. And then when I say somewhere in the ballpark, I mean, I wanna give away less than more, and then I wanna provide whatever other advantages I can that aren't financial so that I can protect the resources that we have.

10:27An example of that is we like to talk about kind of white glove service that we offer to companies that is, if you're gonna bring a factory here, let's say, just to give an example, we wanna make sure that we've got somebody who's kind of a concierge for your company that's walking you through each of our departments where you need a permit.

10:47It doesn't mean we're lowering the standards. It just means, a lot of times the bureaucracy eats up so much time, it makes it impossible for a company to actually do what they wanna do in your state. We try to make sure that if we're gonna attract a large company, 1000, 2,000, 3,000 jobs, you know, that we're at least making it a little easier for them

11:06to go through without having to give them massive tax incentives. So that's the way I think about it. We are in competition. There's just no doubt about it, should we be? There's a lot of discussion about we shouldn't, and maybe at the federal level we should do something about leveling the playing field, but this is the world we're living in right now.

11:23- I wanna ask those questions just to set the baseline. I really do think something is happening, right? A lot of young people are dissatisfied with the status quo. A lot of people in general are dissatisfied with what big tech companies are trying to do with AI, with the potential for job loss. And the relationship between the people,

11:43the government and those companies seems more fraught than ever, especially as they're trying to expand their physical infrastructure with data centers, especially as they all become defense contractors, literally taking our tax dollars to sell weapon systems and collect data for the government.

11:59That's a big swirl. I wanted to start there, but I just want to take one second here and ask you the Decoder questions because I personally think, the operation of government is so opaque. It's very easy to go figure out how big companies are run. The CEOs won't shut up. They're on podcasts all day long. I think most people have no idea how your job works.

12:18So you were elected governor. How is your office set up and how have you structured the state government of Illinois? - Just starting from where I sit, and then of course we look at it from a customer service perspective, but starting just at the top, I actually did something that no governor of Illinois has ever done, which is, I created not one deputy governor.

12:39We obviously have a lieutenant governor who's elected also, but a deputy governor is somebody getting appointed by me to serve under me to help manage the government with me. What I did was actually put four deputy governors in place, plus a general counsel and my chief of staff. Why is that important?

13:00Because what I've tried to do is to break down the silos of government and take all of the health and human services related departments, that's the Department of Public Health, the Department of Human Services, the Department of Healthcare and Family Services. So that's everything from health insurance or Medicaid

13:21to just public health, like during the pandemic, and put it all under one deputy governor working directly for me. The idea is instead of my having, let's say, 26 direct reports, I've got four or five direct reports plus my chief of staff who each have, let's say, six or seven departments underneath them.

13:47So that's the way, from my perspective, what I wanted to do was make sure that I'm breaking down the silos of government, making these departments that often they're basically building walls and they don't wanna talk to one another 'cause they're afraid they might lose jobs in one department to another department or lose control of a program if they're talking to one another.

14:07That's the way it used to be. Now we're like the deputy governor is there to either beat the heads together or at least bring them together so that they will be operating government more efficiently. Okay, so that's, again, from the top. From the bottom, which is how do people who live in Illinois interact with state government?

14:28And obviously technology is one of the upgrades that's occurred and made it easier. Illinois, frankly, had not invested significantly before I became governor in those processes and frankly, the technology that was necessary. And I'll just give you one example of this.

14:50We created something called Beacon, which is designed to address the problem that parents have and families have with mental health for children. It turns out that there were like seven different ways in which people approached government to get help, and we weren't coordinating those

15:10and we weren't helping give all of the resources. I'm talking about outside resources. You know, how do you find a therapist? How do you find a psychiatrist? And how do you pay for those things, right, Medicaid, if you can't afford it on your own. But the point is, there's one door to enter through Beacon that allows you to get access to all of those resources,

15:33even if they're in multiple departments. So that's just one example. We're trying to think of this as a customer service operation so that, again, you know, it's one thing to say this is how the org chart looks, and another thing to say, you know, this is how you access all the resources of government that you need. 'Cause you know the thing that bothers me most,

15:55we provide programs that really matter to people. Like, we have a birth equity initiative to reduce maternal mortality, particularly in Black and brown communities. And so we provide for some families, like, free diapers for some people, free diapers, right? The problem is, people don't even know that program exists.

16:18And how would you ever figure out that the program exists, especially if you're a working person who's working two minimum wage jobs, right? You don't have any time, and you don't have any money, and you don't even know how to talk to government. And so we're trying to fix all of those problems of government with the way that we interact with people.

16:40- It's funny, it feels like that is one of the bigger opportunities when it comes to AI, just letting the AI navigate a bureaucracy for you and communicate what resources are available. The flip side of that is that people hate AI. They truly dislike it. And it doesn't feel like that connection has been made, that a lot of these tools

17:00can actually just navigate a bureaucracy for you. Are you thinking that should be an investment that you make that that might be what turns the tide in terms of how people feel about these tools? - Yes, but I'm not plunging headlong into it. And I realize that there are probably states that are plunging headlong into it. - I mean, the United States government rolled out

17:21their AI chatbot to look at webpages across the government. - Well, there you go. And I mean, I guess what I'm trying to do is make sure that I created something called the AI Cabinet in my government, and that is to essentially bring the experts on AI together with the leaders of my mainstay agencies of state government

17:46so that we're thinking about privacy, we're thinking about safety, and we're thinking about efficiency. And those things have to be talked about together. You can't just say, "We're going after efficiency and we don't really care about the other two." So that's the idea, the AI Cabinet.

18:06It's also that, honestly, there are things, as you know about AI that are dangerous. And so we've got our emergency management agency on that AI Cabinet. You know, we've got our state police on that AI Cabinet. Remember, a lot of the people that work in those agencies aren't particularly proficient at AI or really understand the potential

18:27and the potential dangers. So that's why we brought in experts, for example, from the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, you know, just as two examples of places where we're drawing expertise.

18:39So, yeah, I mean, there's a lot to be done. I would say we're trying to approach it carefully before we get it out of control and to a point where we have no way to pull it back in. - [Nilay] Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another edition of Decoder Sessions. This segment features Andrew Melnizek, the Verge's general manager,

19:00and Ivan Shefrin, the executive director for Managed Security Services at Comcast Business. I hope you enjoy this conversation. (upbeat music) - Let's talk about artificial intelligence. I wanna understand how has AI changed the cybersecurity landscape for you and your team at the attack level?

19:21- The reality is, it has had a dramatic impact on everything we do. The bad guys leverage AI for malicious and bad purposes. So the only way to fight fire is with fire. And so we now use AI just as the attackers are using it

19:41to break in more quickly. We have to pivot and use it to defend more quickly at scale. - Comcast business specifically detected 25.4 billion phishing attempts and 21.9 billion drive-by compromise events over one year. Talk to me a little bit about that data.

20:01- Phishing is so popular because it's so easy to do, and AI has accelerated that. Every business should have software in place to detect phishing attacks, to train their users, and also that now extends to collaboration software, not just email, such as Zoom, such as Slack, such as Teams,

20:24because that's becoming increasingly prevalent. Everybody expects to get breached now, and that is not the attitude we use at Comcast. We take protecting our customer data extremely seriously. (upbeat music)

20:43- The other decoder question I ask everybody is about decisions. You have a big job, you have some constraints in your decision making process, right? There's a state legislature, there's a federal government, you have other agencies in your state. How do you make decisions? What's your framework? - Well, I don't do it the way Donald Trump does.

20:58(Nilay laughing) I should start with the, you know, 'cause it's funny you say it that way. I mean, I start with the idea that we have a problem to solve and that decisions have to get made. Are those decisions ones that need to come to the governor? 'Cause you're right, I only have so much bandwidth.

21:19And so the question is, which are the most serious ones that can't be solved by other people or unlikely to get the outcomes that I would want by handing it over to other people? And then those automatically come to me. So what I'm making decisions about is kind of the first answer to your question, and then it's how do I actually make the decisions?

21:42For me, I am not one of these people who thinks that I'm right 100% of the time. I mean, maybe a good way to describe it, and I'm joking a little bit when I say it, which is I'm 90% sure I'm right, but there's also a 10% chance that I'm dead wrong. I wanna make sure that I'm getting input and a debate

22:02before I actually make the final decision. So I like to, you know... Someone once told me that the best CEOs are ones that in their organization, they're a little bit below average in terms of their capability and intellect. That is, you're hiring so well. I'm not saying we want below average leaders.

22:23I'm just saying you're so good at hiring that you've got people in your organization who are really far better than you are at various things that you're not particularly good at. Maybe know what you don't know and be willing to ask for help is a philosophy that I have. You know, be willing to ask for help if it's something you really don't know.

22:43And I'll be honest, when you become governor of a state, there are a whole lot of topics within the purview of a governor. And making decisions about all those topics, maybe a human being who has super intelligence might be able to do it, but most people don't start out knowing everything there is to know about public health

23:03and everything there is to know about public safety and everything there is to know about education. And so you start out with what you know and then try to add expertise to it and then make decisions based upon the best experts debating one another in front of you.

23:20At least that's how I like to do it. - Give you an example. Governor Kathy Hochul from New York was on the show. She said in her first week she needed to declare a state of emergency because of a hurricane and she just didn't know how, which was very humanizing in its way. Give me an example of when you became governor

23:35and there was something where you just didn't know. - COVID. - Sure. - I mean, honestly, no one runs for governor thinking there's gonna be a global pandemic, right? You think you're gonna solve education problems for people or put more money in people's pockets by raising the minimum wage or whatever, but COVID comes along. And I have to admit, the level of expertise of,

23:57I don't think any governor, maybe Josh Green, the doctor who's the governor of Hawaii, maybe he had a lot to start with, but for the rest of us humans, you know, that was one where we were learning on the job. We were working 18 hours a day. My entire team was all in.

24:20And we had to do things like emergency procurement of ventilators and masks. And we had to go outside the box. It's not like we could just put it through you know, our central management services, you know, look for a contract or whatever. This was like, I need masks in three days, you know.

24:44And I need.... I'll tell you a quick story if you're interested about, my interaction with Donald Trump at the time 'cause I think it's interesting anyway. But I'm not a big fan of Donald Trump in case you didn't know. I was at one year into office when the COVID pandemic hit, and I had not, I mean, I talked to his administration

25:06but not talked to him directly. I picked up the phone and called him and I said, "Mr. President... By the way, I wrote a script for myself 'cause I know he likes to be flattered and I'm not somebody who normally likes to flatter him, but I wrote a script for myself. I saved it, even I have it today.

25:27And I said, "Mr. President, you're a great businessman, but you can understand that paying $8 for an N95 mask that should cost us 75 cents, we're in a national emergency. We need to be able to get these things and afford them. And I'm competing against all the other states. You know, we need to invoke the Defense Production Act

25:49in order to make sure that we're making enough masks in the United States." That's what I told him. And then I said, "But I need masks right now. What can you do for me?" I said, "I need 2 million N95 masks, and I need 4,000 ventilators." He never delivered, just so you know, even though he promised that he would deliver.

26:08The challenges in COVID were mighty, and the organization that we had to create around it, I had morning meetings every morning just on this topic, right, figuring out, okay, how many hospital beds? We didn't have a system that would tell us statewide how many hospital beds are available

26:30in each region. You know, what happens if you have an outbreak and it really is overtaking some region, what do we do? These were all the things we had to learn on the fly. And all I can tell you is, once again, back to the hire great people to have around you, I really felt like I proved out

26:47that I had done a good job of hiring because the people around me were tremendous, one of whom, by the way, is now running as my lieutenant governor partner in this election. - It's interesting you brought up COVID in the context of our conversation about generational political realignment. I would actually point to COVID is the beginning of a particular realignment

27:09around what the government should measure, how much control the government should have over people, and all of that has led, I think, directly into the bipartisan pushback against Flock cameras.

27:19The very notion of privacy is not, in my mind, left right anymore. The CEO of Flock got himself in all kinds of trouble because he kept saying, "All the people wanted to ban Flock camera are criminals." And he would go on MAGA media and say this. And I think that position was just rejected. We can see in states around the country,

27:37there's pushback against Flock cameras. And I would point to COVID as the beginning of that, right? The idea that the government could be too intrusive, and in particular, the government should not be able to measure things, right? Like, if you don't test, there won't be COVID, just became an idea. And the idea that we shouldn't measure things

27:54or we should tear down our systems of measurement, it's a big part of the second Trump administration. But I see that privacy connection very clearly to COVID. In one world, the government coming together to protect its citizens and build a bunch of systems, it could have gone a very different way. In the one we live in, there's ferocious pushback to that,

28:16on the left and the right in some ways. How do you feel about privacy right now? I know Illinois kind of leads the nation. You've got the Biometric Identification Protection Act. Every time I fly to Chicago, I gotta push the button at the airport to say that it's okay to look at my face. That's one way of going about it.

28:32But then you do have, I think there are hundreds of Flock cameras in Cook County alone. People have Meta glasses with cameras in them. There's something happening with privacy that is running right into the aftershocks of COVID and how people feel about government intrusion. How are you finding a way through that balance? - Well, and don't forget AI is, as you're suggesting,

28:52I mean, talk about a collision. This focus on privacy is warranted and long overdue, to be honest with you. I understand what you're describing about COVID, but I think something that came out of COVID got accelerated and that was conspiracy theories.

29:13- Yes. - And I'm not suggesting that everything you hear now about the pushback around privacy is a conspiracy theory, but it is easy for these things to spread and people have misinformation that's informing them about how these things are used. Having said that, I guess what I think

29:35is that we are having to solve multiple problems at the same time. And AI is coming. Let's just go to AI for a second. It's here. I mean, I say it's coming. It's here. It's not going to stop. We're not going to become Luddites and there's not gonna be any AI. So the question is, in the context of privacy,

29:57what guardrails are we putting on AI? And how are we managing it? This idea that the president has, and David Sacks, where they got all the companies together and said, "Hey, how about you guys self-police?" That's not gonna work, at least not for protecting people's privacy. And frankly, it's not gonna provide any safety either

30:20because everybody's gonna operate in their own self-interest. It's one of the reasons why you need government in my view. I'm not suggesting government is any smarter than these companies, but one of the reasons you have any kind of collective action of government is because separately, as you know, people operate

30:40because they operate in their own self-interest. I mean, you could have like a Hobbesian world where people are killing each other and there are no rules about it. So I think we've gotta use government as a tool and also be smart within government. And that's where the generational change, I think, is hugely important. Use government as a smarter,

31:02less bureaucratic and smarter collection of people devoted to protecting the privacy of everyone and making sure that we're addressing all the other challenges that come from AI. I guess I'll just say, I don't think we're anywhere near where we need to be, but I will say, if we don't have a federal government,

31:24now I'm very proud of the things that we've done here in Illinois around the AI Safety Measures Act, which is the toughest in the country, the Children's Social Media Safety Act, and so on. I think I'm proud of the work we've done, but state by state, this is not the way to do this. We're doing the best we can with an absence

31:47of a federal government that is addressing these. And when I say federal government, I'm not just pointing at Trump, I'm pointing at the Congress. No action on their part means that we're going at it alone. And right now, I don't know how many AI safety measures types acts have been passed, but looks like three to me.

32:07I mean, it's New York, California, and Illinois, maybe that you could name a couple others, but we were the first, and I mean, we three, and yet, what we got, 47 other states now. So this worries me a great deal. You're raising issues. I'd love to tell you I have all the answers to it. I can tell you what we're trying to think about

32:29is that people sometimes say, the states are laboratories of democracy. They're actually laboratories of policy, at least in Illinois, we're trying to use ourselves as a laboratory policy while not disadvantaging ourselves. That's a very challenging thing to do and why we need to change what's happening at the federal government.

32:50- Let me just say focus on privacy for one second. And I understand what you're saying about AI. I think part of the privacy debate around Flock cameras, for example, is, well, sure, you can have one license plate reader in one intersection. And if the cops had to go there and pull the SD card out of it

33:06and drive it back to headquarters and upload it to their Apple IIe and look at it manually, maybe people would feel one way about it. But those cameras are all networked. They don't have any access controls really. There's infinite reports of local police chiefs tracking their girlfriends across state lines with these cameras. You add in a system like Palantir,

33:25which can synthesize multiple databases and do all kinds of tracking across all kinds of systems. People see that, right? That is the turn that is being made is that you can connect a lot of databases of information together and search them without a warrant and track people across the entire country. You could ban that state by state,

33:43you could regulate it city by city, which we're seeing happen with Flock, and you could maybe have some federal controls around privacy there. None of it's really happening, but on the ground, people are ferociously pushing back. And that's the connection I'm making to COVID and conspiracy theories and how much power should the government have to surveil you and look at you.

34:03Something happened in there where people's attitudes about that really shifted. And I would say one of my core beliefs is that Americans do not like being told what to do. Party politics aside, Americans don't like being told what to do. And something about that flipped and connected to, we have a network of license plate reading cameras and we're gonna tear them down when we see them

34:25because there's something about that that offends us as Americans. Illinois does have privacy laws. I think the last update to the biometric law you did in 2024, it's changed again. It's gotten more vociferously opposed to tracking and surveillance in this country. Do you think you need another update to that privacy law? - I think we should every year be looking at that question.

34:47I'll give you an example of it. We passed it, and again, I'm back to AI because I think what you're describing, I thought was a perfect way to say it. If it was an SD card that they had to go grab and then analyze back at the station, it'd be a different thing, but it's AI that's operating these things

35:05and that's allowing this stuff to move instantaneously and track people. Look, should we be addressing? Yeah, every year. I mean, it's like the issue of ethics in government. What I mean is, the minute you put an ethics law in place, there's somebody who's trying to get around it every year.

35:28It's like every law, this is probably true across all of capitalism maybe. There are always people trying to find a way around the law, put a tax law in place. Someone's trying to figure out how to get around it. And I think that the point you're making is that that's why you need to have proactively government,

35:50like less bureaucratically and more aggressively trying to address these issues. Are we gonna be able to keep up with it? I'll be honest, I don't think so. And I also don't think you can say, well, we're just gonna shut it all down because there are things you're missing out on. It's sort of like, and again, I keep going back to AI,

36:12but I think a lot about it. My children are 21 and 24. They're gonna live to 100 or 110 years old because AI is gonna solve a whole bunch of medical challenges and already is. And there's a cure now for sickle cell anemia

36:33and people who would otherwise die at 25 or 30 years old are gonna live full lives. This is gonna happen across the board in cancer and everything else. So there's all good in there and then there's the bad. And so I know what you're saying. I guess all I can tell you is I'm a believer that we can progressively,

36:55I don't mean that in a political fashion, we can progressively address these challenges. Like in Illinois, we passed a law that disallows the use of AI in therapy for people because we think too much information gets collected, not enough humanity in the process,

37:16and we think that it should have humanity in it. And so again, we're not trying to shut it down across the board, but we're gonna have to see how it gets used and where it's improper. And I know that sounds imperfect because the technology is moving so fast that the idea

37:37that we're gonna be able to keep up with all the ways in which someone's privacy could be breached seems very difficult. But I don't know any other way to do it. I mean, that's why you have government. And maybe in the end, we're gonna have this competing use of things like AI where AI is monitoring AI,

37:59and AI that's kind of privacy friendly or focused on privacy is gonna be monitoring the AI that's not. But again, I know you don't want to just talk about AI. I am concerned. I think this issue of privacy has been around for a long time. You've been talking about, I'm sure,

38:20I've been talking about it since before AI, right? This is like everybody giving over their personal information in exchange for access to something. And that was happening for a while. And then we're all getting ads that are personalized to us based upon stuff that essentially we've given up privacy for. (upbeat music)

38:41- [Announcer] Support for the show comes from Engine.

38:43The average business traveler spends 45 minutes booking a single trip on a legacy platform. With Engine, that booking time drops to as little as two and a half minutes, and its AI powered personalization gets faster the more you use it. Multiply that across your team every trip, every year, that's not a perk, that's a competitive advantage. And with the Engine X card,

39:05get up to 10% back on any hotel booking. Last year, Engine customers saved more than $300 million on travel. 33,000 businesses have joined. Now it's your turn. Get $500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at engine.com/decoder. Engine X Visa commercial cards are issued by Fifth Third Bank North America, member FDIC.

39:29Earn up to 10% back in points on eligible engine travel purchases. Actual reward rates vary by purchase, category, and may change. Points have no cash value and are redeemable for rewards through our program. See full rewards terms for details. Go to engine.com/x/rewards-terms.

39:49(upbeat music fades) - No, it's funny. I mean, people believe whether or not... We can write as many stories as we want about what your iPhone is not actually listening to you, but the ad tracking is so good that everyone believes that their iPhones are listening to them. The next turn is that it is now technologically feasible

40:06for these systems to listen to you all the time. And I can't fall back on, you know, it's cheaper for them to do the ad tracking when you hit I accept than to listen to you all the time, which was for a decade the right answer. The economically correct answer was the ad tracking was cheaper than listening to you all the time.

40:23That might be very different in the future. There are already devices that we cover here at The Verge that prefer to listen to you all the time and turn that into some actionable data. And it feels to me like the tech industry is trying to drive a truck through our privacy law, through our lack of AI regulations,

40:42through an entire system of governance that is designed for the pre-AI era, right? The notion that you don't have privacy in public really worked well when everyone didn't have a cell phone that could connect to the cloud and instantly search every photo all at once all the time and do facial recognition. We live in that world now.

41:01I would say the public sentiment towards the idea that you don't have privacy in public places has turned, right? They don't like the Meta glasses. They call them pervert glasses for a reason. And somewhere in there is, well, the federal government should pass privacy law. It is a failure of imagination in the United States. We don't have federal privacy law.

41:18And then somewhere in there is the notion that the states are laboratories to democracy and policy. It is amazing, by the way, how often on this tech and business show, Thomas Hobbes comes up and the very notion that the government is there to serve as an extension of us solving collective action problems. It comes up over and over again

41:35because I think the tech industry does not want to respect that dynamic. This is why I started with that relationship between government and business and the pushback and the negotiation because here it feels like the tech industry is in a bubble of its own making, truly in a media bubble of its own making. And then all of the polling is, well, we hate AI.

41:55In particular, young people hate AI.

41:57And then all of the action is around data centers where NIMBYism, the most American of policy levers, is being pulled to keep these data centers out of communities. And that's one way to stop AI. You just pulled back on data center tax incentives in July. You're pushing the state legislature to adopt a suite of guarantees on reforms for new constructions.

42:18Do you think data centers and the pushback on data centers is an effective route towards AI regulation? - I don't. I think it's an effective route toward data center regulation. I mean, I know that people have conflated and put together their opposition to data centers with their opposition to AI,

42:39and a lot of people can't describe why they're opposed to one or the other 'cause they're conflated with one another. But I can say that, I mean, at least our aim is focused on the idea, and people really feel this, right? I mean, and there's real data to back this up, that the data centers themselves put aside what they're doing inside a data center.

43:01The data centers and what's happening are eating up the available electricity and that's causing your electric bill to go up. At least that's how everybody feels. There are a lot of things that we should have been doing in many years gone by to get to a point where electricity bills shouldn't have to go up now.

43:22And that has to do with building out the grid, which, it's a world where regulation and cross-border challenges have made it near impossible for a lot of the grid to get built the way that it should have. We produce a lot more electricity in the United States than we use, but we just don't transport it well enough

43:46and we would have a lot more available if we transported it better. Okay, but even if you think that can't happen efficiently, we need to build more on the grid that is more capacity on the grid. My only point is, the opposition to data centers is in part a result of the economic situation

44:07that's happening right now in the country where electric bills, gas, everything at rent, you know, everything has gone up, and your electric bill shows up every month and it continues to go up and people kind of scratch their heads and say, "Who am I paying for?" This is happening. And this particular to Illinois.

44:28We're not gonna have a whole discussion about energy policy, but I could just say this. We produce more nuclear power in the state of Illinois than any other state. 53 or 4% of our electricity comes from nuclear power, and we're a net electricity exporter, so we have an excess in Illinois.

44:50But our bills are going up in Illinois and that's because of the methodology of the regional transmission organizations. Again, not to get in all the detail of it, but essentially if Ohio decides to build a hyperscale data center, our bills in Illinois are affected. And that's shocking to people who live in Illinois,

45:15but what they know is, they don't want their bill to go up so they don't want another data center nearby, even though the one in Ohio is actually causing the problem even if you choose to oppose data centers. So this is a challenge. I mean, I think there's a lot of information that needs to be spread, but most of all,

45:35we just need a whole lot more capacity and a whole lot more grid that will, I think, subside some of the concern about data centers. But to your point, I mean, privacy is I think more related to AI obviously than data centers. It's not just AI, but the way AI is used. So we're gonna have a lot of opposition.

45:56I mean, you make an excellent point. I think this feeling of being out of control, you are not in control of your environments anymore, that's the thing that is causing anxiety. I wanna go back to something really important that I was saying earlier.

46:15We need better people running for public office. We need smarter policy development in government. And part of that is a generational shift that's needed and a better understanding. We have people that are serving in the United States Senate who have no idea, like what was it? The Secretary of Education,

46:36Trump's Secretary of Education who called it A1. We've got older people who don't have any exposure who are making policy theoretically on these things. And I mean, it should disturb us all. It's one of the reasons we've gotta advance the cause of better people and better systems in government. - We are on the cusp of an election.

46:58There might be a new Congress, there might be new leadership in Congress. There are a bunch of old Democrats too. In fact, I could probably point directly to Joe Biden's age in the last election is the reason that he lost. Do you think that you need a wholesale change of leadership of the older Democrats as well? - You said, do we need a wholesale change?

47:16I mean, I can tell you that I don't think... - Well, I live in New York... - We should be telling... - I'll just ask you, do you think Chuck Schumer should be the Senate majority leader if the Democrats take the Senate? - That's a decision people in the Senate are gonna make. I have no influence over it.

47:26I can tell you this: I am opposed to term limits because I think that you should have all the choices. You're a voter. If you wanna vote for the 75-year-old, I mean, go ahead. I'm just suggesting that a great case could be made for the 45-year-old who's just as smart

47:47as the 75-year-old was when he was 45 or whatever, or maybe is now, but has a modern look at the issues around AI, privacy, and everything else we're discussing, and has a more aggressive view of how we ought to be reining in big corporations in their invasion of our lives.

48:08But I think people ought to make their own choices. I mean, for us to say, well, we should have an age limit. You know, you're 70, that's it. You know, you're out. I think that belies who we are as a democracy. - Will you convince me? I'm 46. I'm announcing my run for president here with you, Governor.

48:28That was arousing speech. - Listen, I would vote for you in a second if the choice was you and Donald Trump. - A low bar, but I'm glad I crossed it. Let me tie two ideas together at the end. We've talked a lot about AI regulation.

48:40You mentioned social media regulation a little bit earlier in this conversation. I know that Illinois has a social media law. You have a bell-to-bell ban on phones and schools for kids. I'm just gonna pick on Mark Zuckerberg. It's easy to pick on Mark Zuckerberg. If you look at how he talks about social media regulation, he basically describes the tragedy of the commons, right,

48:59that you signed the landmark settlement with him. I think Illinois is due to get 750, $760 million out of that settlement. And a big part of it is TikTok and YouTube have to agree to the same terms, and then Meta will pay the rest of the money. And Zuckerberg very clearly has said, that's because if Instagram falls back on engagement bait

49:18and TikTok doesn't, the kids will just use TikTok. And so the government has to get everyone to agree. I will tell you that Neal Mohan, the CEO of YouTube, does not agree. He's not gonna sign onto this. That's one whole fight. You look at how Mark Zuckerberg talks about AI regulation, there's none of that dynamic at all.

49:34He's like, "It should be a free for all. We'll all compete. If it's not safe, the market will tell us, we'll be fine." And in my mind, these ideas are at total odds with each other, right? In the market where he makes all the money, the government has to step in and stop him from hurting kids because apparently there's no market demand

49:51for safe social media. And in the market where the AI CEOs are telling us they might kill us all if we don't stop them, it's a free for all, and the market will tell us if they accidentally kill everybody. How do you reconcile those things? Are you just happy that you got the social media case done after a decade of failing to regulate social media,

50:09or do you think you can solve AI with regulation this time instead of letting it just cook? - Look, I'm an optimist at heart. I think that... So I'm not gonna suggest to you that I know absolutely that we can solve all the problems that we're now facing, but I don't know what else that we can do.

50:30You know, I mean, other than to, again, progressively make sure that we're trying to address each of these things, trying to anticipate them to the extent we can. Can we be faster than the AI is developing? I don't know. We can't stop trying, I know that. And I would suggest to you that my optimism is founded

50:53because I think the vast majority of people want what you're describing, which is reining it in. And again, without destroying companies, I don't think we're all trying to do that. What we're trying to do is, stop the invasion into our home, stop the invasion into our children's lives. I do think we can do that,

51:14but that's because we've solved a whole lot of huge problems. You know, that's kind of like my answer to the, is AI potentially existential? The answer, of course, is yes. And can we solve it? I don't know. You know, nuclear weapons, I mean, just to give something of an analogy to something else,

51:36I mean, nuclear weapons, they're still hanging over us as a danger to humanity. So far anyway, we've managed not to blow up the world. I don't know whether that gives you any optimism, but it does to me. We as a country can figure out how we want to rein it in here,

51:56that we as a country can work with our allies to figure out how we wanna collectively try to rein it in. And then we have enemies in the world and competitors in the world, and we've gotta figure out how we're gonna, maybe it's mutually assured destruction like it was with nuclear weapons.

52:17These are all things we're gonna have to work on and work on fast. And it's scary because someone analogized this to... I mean, think about the early 1950s when every kid had to learn you know, that if there was a nuclear blast, you know, atomic bomb that went out, you know, get onto your desk. I mean, that wouldn't have been very effective,

52:38but the point is, people lived with the idea that, like, terrible Holocaust could occur with a nuclear explosion that could happen. And so I think we're heading into that world again with AI. So I hope I didn't stray too much from your question,

52:59- But... - Well, let me ask you this, and it's a little bit of a wild card at the end. We cover this industry so closely here, and the big difference to nuclear weapons is there weren't five companies building bleeding edge nuclear weapons in private capacity led by five guys who all hated each other. But that's the dynamic of the AI industry.

53:18They all truly hate each other. They're all trying to make as much money as they can as fast they can. And then some of them think the AI is alive, right? If you ask Anthropic, and we've done this, "Is Claude alive?" They don't say no, right? They will argue with you about the definition of alive and suggest that to them alive means

53:38having a biological component, and Claude doesn't have that, but it might be conscious, right? There's a race to build AGI in the industry. Some people truly believe they're building alien minds that have a different kind of consciousness. I'm not sure any government at any level has ever had to regulate that, has ever come up against an industry that is religious

53:59about the fact that it might be building the next kind of intelligence. Where do you stand? Do you think that they're building a next kind of consciousness that stands along humans, or do you think that this is normal technology as some others do? - Boy, that is really another podcast for us, but I'll just say this one thing.

54:16I just wanna disagree with you for a second. Nobody ever could imagine a nuclear weapon either. - Right, but the government built nuclear weapons. It wasn't... Yeah. - I understand. I'm not suggesting it's the same. I'm suggesting it's so new at the time that figuring out how you're gonna rein it in, 'cause remember, it's not just one government.

54:38And the same thing with AI, it's not just those five guys either, right? I mean, it's like there's somebody in China, maybe five of those, I don't know, and somebody in Europe or whatever. I mean, you could say we're ahead or they're ahead. I don't know. But all I'm saying is, yeah, this is a proliferated situation and it's not government controlled.

54:59100%, you're right. It's not like nuclear weapons in that sense, but it is like nuclear weapons in the sense of nobody's ever seen it before. It's a complete mystery to start with. How are we going to rein it in? I mean, nobody thought Russia was going to get the bomb and they got it. We've figured out somehow how to deal with it.

55:19Again, you gotta be an optimist to believe we can end up with the right solution here. I don't know that we have the answer to how do we rein it in. I will say though, if we had the power to create it, we have the power in my view to rein it in. Is it conscious? You're asking a... - Yeah. Have you felt the AGI?

55:41- Deep question. I mean, do you think it's conscious? 'Cause I mean, I understand why people think it might have consciousness or it's going to be conscious, but I think that's why the ethicists need to be involved and it's why I think technologists need to be involved, and especially in my view, government's gotta be involved

56:04'cause how else are you gonna rein in the five guys and the companies that have developed this? There is no other way. - I will tell you, I don't think it's conscious. And every now and again, you have an experience where it's blindingly clear why other people believe that. When you watch a reasoning model take 90 steps over an hour

56:28and arrive at a conclusion, it's impressive. And you can see why people believe that. I do not, and I have a lot of reasons for that. It just occurs to me that if you were to set out to regulate a technology like this, if you believe one thing, you would maybe go down one path. And if you believe that you were building a consciousness,

56:48you might go down another. And again, the whole industry itself does not agree on this. Jensen Huang and Dario Amodei do not agree on whether it's alive. Jensen just wants to sell a bunch of chips, and he'll happily tell you it's just technology and you can control it. And I think Dario thinks he's building AGI, and there's a whole reason

57:07he proposes different kinds of regulatory structures there. I'm just asking you, have you felt the AGI? Do you think it's one path or the other? - Yeah, I'm not gonna give you a satisfactory yes or no. - Yeah, I'm curious. - I mean, I haven't felt it. I guess that's what I'm... My basic answer is, I haven't felt it.

57:22- Governor Pritzker, this was very fun.

57:23Thank you for indulging this last existential loop of a question. You're gonna have to come back to Decoder soon. - I would like to do that. Thanks, Nilay. - Thank you so much. (upbeat music) To get new episodes every Monday and Thursday, subscribe to our YouTube channel @DecoderPod and find us on TikTok and Instagram under @DecoderPod for more fun stuff we put out almost every day.

57:42If you enjoy this episode, please send a link to it to someone you think you might like it. It really helps us grow the show. You can also subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll see you next time.