by Kevin Truong : sfstandard – excerpt

In a Palace Hotel ballroom packed with hundreds of investors, engineers and business leaders, San Francisco Mayor London Breed made a confident proclamation: The city is the “the AI capital of the world,” she said.

Breed closed out the one-day AI Forward conference, touting the city’s roster of deep-pocketed investors and local universities that make it fertile ground for artificial intelligence. Organized by Goldman Sachs and SV Angel, the conference featured Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and OpenAI President Greg Brockman, among others.

In her remarks, Breed pitched the city as the epicenter of cutting-edge tech along with some big ideas, such as a partial redevelopment of the Westfield San Francisco Centre, the Downtown mall Nordstrom recently announced its departure from, or putting a soccer field and open space right in the middle of the Moscone Center.

“Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to focus on creating this incredible, innovative thing that’s going on that everybody is talking about,” Breed told the crowd…(more)

Is anyone else tired of being the capital of the world yet? Does anyone believe that San Franciscos is the AI capital of the world? Do we want to be the AI victim of every experiment that business can dream up? Nobody trusts this new technology but our mayor has decided to make us test subjects for a systme that no one knows anything about.

Problems are most obvious with the autocabs, but, for all we know nextbus and school payroll problems stem from experimental AI systems that are beyond human capacity to fix because the codes are not written by humans.

I can’t wait to see what the AI consultant is going to spit out as a remedy for the downtown “doom loop”. I’m sure the Mayor will gush all over it regardless of what it is. Anybody who describes our city’s future as “an incredible, innovative thing” does not have my vote of confidence. That elevator pitch is too vague for me.