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(Para ver la versión en español visite aquí).
Dear Neighbors,
Human beings have always been remarkably good at inventing the future before deciding what to do with it. Every generation has confronted some invention that arrived before the rulebook.
Factories transformed cities before workers had meaningful protections. Automobiles filled our streets before traffic lights, licenses, and modern safety laws caught up. The internet connected the world before we fully understood what an economy built on our attention, our data, and our private lives might cost us, or what it could do to our public discourse and even our understanding of truth.
Again and again, human ingenuity has moved faster than the institutions entrusted with protecting the public.
Now, artificial intelligence may be the most consequential test yet of whether we have learned anything from that history.
This week, as world leaders gathered here in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, artificial intelligence reached the Security Council amid increasingly serious warnings about the power these systems may acquire and the consequences if human oversight fails to keep pace. These questions no longer belong to laboratories or science fiction. They reach into our workplaces and classrooms, our privacy and civil rights, the information we trust, the decisions made about our lives, and ultimately the question of who remains accountable when machines are given the power to make consequential choices.
We should listen carefully to those warnings without surrendering to either panic or complacency.
The danger is not innovation itself. Human progress has always depended upon our willingness to imagine what does not yet exist. The danger is technology without accountability, capability without oversight, and decision-making without transparency.
Public policy has a name for part of this challenge: the “pacing problem.” Technology can change almost overnight, while laws, schools, institutions, and public understanding require time to adapt. But democracy cannot simply surrender that distance. The faster technology moves, the more urgent our responsibility becomes to ask difficult questions, establish boundaries, and protect people before harm becomes the price of progress.
AI is already changing how we work, learn, communicate, consume information, and make decisions. Its possibilities are extraordinary. So are the responsibilities that accompany them. Technology powerful enough to shape human lives must never become too powerful for human beings to govern.
That is where government has a responsibility to act.
At a time when Washington has favored a lighter federal regulatory approach, New York has chosen to establish guardrails of its own. Last year, we enacted the RAISE Act, which I co-sponsored, requiring the largest developers of frontier AI models to disclose safety protocols, report critical safety incidents, and operate under a new state oversight structure.
And our responsibility cannot end there.
This year, the Legislature continued confronting what artificial intelligence means for workers, consumers, young people, public infrastructure, and the press. Among those efforts, we passed legislation requiring disclosure when news content is substantially or entirely generated by artificial intelligence. In a democracy, people deserve to know whether the information placed before them came from human journalism or was generated by a machine.
The principle connecting this work is simple: technology will continue to change. The fundamental obligation of government does not. Innovation should expand human possibility without diminishing human dignity.
And perhaps nowhere is that responsibility more important than in our schools.
The children sitting in New York classrooms today will inherit an economy, a democracy, and a civic life profoundly shaped by technologies we are only beginning to understand. Preparing them for that world cannot mean simply teaching them how to use new tools. We must give them the literacy to understand those tools, the curiosity to question them, the judgment to recognize their limits, and the confidence to know when human wisdom must have the final word.
That is why I see a connection between the laws we write today and the classrooms where tomorrow is already taking shape.
Legislation, at its best, is society refusing to wait helplessly for consequences.
We will never write laws quickly enough to anticipate every invention, every algorithm, or every disruption still beyond the horizon. But we can decide which values must endure when everything else changes: transparency over secrecy, accountability over unchecked power, opportunity over exploitation, and human dignity above all.
I love New York because this state has never been one face, one language, one neighborhood, or one way of imagining the future. We are millions of people carrying different histories and different hopes, sharing crowded sidewalks, classrooms, workplaces, subway cars, and one extraordinary experiment in living together. Whatever future artificial intelligence helps create, it must still belong to them: to the worker whose job is changing, the student discovering what is possible, the immigrant building a new life, the parent wondering what kind of world their child will inherit, and every New Yorker who deserves a voice in the decisions shaping their tomorrow.
The future will arrive whether government is prepared for it or not.
Our responsibility is to make certain that when it does, the people are not merely living in a future designed for them. They must still have a voice in deciding what that future becomes.
In the sections below, I share some of the work we are doing toward that promise, along with community updates, resources, and opportunities from across our district.
In Unity,
RJ
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