JB Pritzker on the danger of leaving AI to five billionaires | Decoder

I don't. I think it's an effective route toward data center regulation.

Listen, I would vote for you in a second if the choice was you and Donald Trump.

Thanks, Nilay. Great to be with you.

Well, we're claiming you now that I know all that. We're claiming you. You're an Illinoisan.

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.

Well, what I can tell you is we're pretty tough negotiators in Chicago and Illinois. And 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, you know, overtaking people's lives and 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, you know, a collaborator with business on everything. And so I'm not, you know, I'm a businessman, as you know, before I became governor, but I also know that the people of Illinois anyway, you know, 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. Generationally, we're a little more aggressive. And I'm, you know, I'm probably older than the next generation that's already, you know, 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 got to become more aggressive and make sure we're standing up for our people.

I can't speak to the Paramount situation well enough to give you an answer. And so it would be unfair for me to do so. I can say once again that our, you know, 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 but certainly transformative is probably a kind way to say it about the economy, that we're going to 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. And you know, I'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 or at least it appears they're going to lose their jobs. If these days 4% unemployment is kind of the acceptable near full employment number, I think the problem we're going to see is if that's sort of the level that we're going to 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 and 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 going to give people the dignity of work and enough income so that they can make a life for themselves when you're going to put people out of work by virtue of this technology. By the way, much of the benefit of that is going to go to a very, very few people. So, we've got to wrestle with that and come to a conclusion.

We are in competition. We just are because 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 hoping to be a four-term Republican governor and a Republican legislature, they have no intention of, you know, changing their alignment about incentives. In the state of Illinois, we don't want to have to do that. I mean, we obviously want to protect the revenue that we've got for the state to pay for the things that we think are valuable to our people, but we also want to make sure that we're attracting jobs and not losing jobs. And in a world where, you know, South Carolina, Michigan, Texas, Florida, you know, pick your poison. I'll, you know, Michigan may be slightly different just because it's got Democratic control, but these are our competitors. I mean, when I'm competing to have a company move to Illinois, you know, I've got to make sure, first of all, that I'm somewhere in the ballpark when it comes to the incentives because otherwise we don't even get considered. And then when I say somewhere in the ballpark, I mean I want to give away less than more. And then I want to provide whatever other advantages I can that aren't financial so that I can protect the resources that we have. An example of that is, you know, we like to talk about kind of white glove service that we offer to companies. That is, if you're going to bring a factory here, let's say, just to give an example, we want to 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. It 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 want to do in your state. We try to make sure that if we're going to attract a large company, a thousand, 2,000, 3,000 jobs, you know, that we're at least making it a little easier for them to 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.

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, we obviously have a lieutenant governor who's elected also, but a deputy governor is somebody 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? Because 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 like, you know, everything from health insurance or, you know, Medicaid to 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. So that's the way I, 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 want to talk to one another because 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. That's the way it used to be. Now we're like, you know, 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.

And 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. We 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 and 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 even 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, I, 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 because, you know, the thing that bothers me most, we 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, you know, free diapers for some people. Free diapers, right? The problem is people don't even know that program exists. And how would you ever figure out that the program exists if you're especially if you're a working person who's working like 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.

Yes, but I'm not plunging headlong into it, you know, and I realize that there are probably states that are plunging headlong into it. I mean, the United States government rolled out their AI chatbot to look at web pages across the government.

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, you know, to essentially bring the experts on AI together with the leaders of my mainstay agencies of state government. So 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, you know, we're going after efficiency and we don't really care about the other two, you know. So that's the idea, the AI cabinet. It'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 and the potential dangers. So that's why we've 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. So yeah, I mean there's a lot to be done. I would say we're trying to approach it carefully before we, you know, get it out of control and to a point where, you know, we have no way to pull it back in.

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 to 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.

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, because that's becoming increasingly prevalent. Everybody expects to get breached now and that is not the attitude we use at Comcast. We are protecting our customer data extremely seriously.