Steve Rao & Jim Weaver Discuss AI, Cybersecurity, and Bridging the Digital Divide
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I'm joined now by Morris Fieldtown Councilman and political commentator Steve Rao as well as Jim Weaver the North Carolina Secretary of Technology. Thank you both so much for joining me. Well Anthony it's so great to be here and this show is normally the Wake County Roundup but we thought it would be a great year you and I talk about technology to bring in Jim Weaver our secretary of technology. He's leaving now going back to Pennsylvania but we want to thank the secretary for coming in studio and today we're going to talk about technology for most of the hours. So Mr. Secretary welcome to the show. Thank you Steve I'll be one of those 140,000 North Carolinians on the road tomorrow for the holidays. Yes. Well we appreciate you taking the time to join us before you kick off that holiday travel and you know one of the reasons that we're so interested to talk to you is you've had a tenure that has kind of seen overseen explosive growth in North Carolina's technology so I'd really like to kick off by getting a look back at how that landscape has changed during the last four years as you've been in office. Well I think the first thing that everyone's going to gravitate to right away is this thing called generative AI. Four years ago we were not talking about generative AI and really we weren't talking a lot about artificial intelligence in general. Although as a state and as a technology you know as a technologist we've been doing artificial intelligence for probably 30, 40 years when you think about different things but the level of end user engagement that generative AI now allows for is exciting. It's a little scary to be candid and you know we're good stewards of North Carolina's data. We have to look at this from a risk based process and approach and really at the end of the day what fuels generative AI is this thing called data and that's the most valuable assets that we have at state government is our data and our data structures and data classification and equally important data security. So this has been challenging us now in a myriad of ways because as you can imagine folks want to go jump into the generative AI pool and go do some really cool things and there's a lot of good things that you can do out there but you know for those Star Wars fans are out there and I apologize for using this as a reference. There's the good side of the force and the bad side of the force and so generative AI is kind of like that force. There's good use cases and there's equally bad use cases that could end up having some very compromising results and what we see then too in the cyber landscape is is that the threat actors are leveraging generative AI just as well and their attacks are becoming more sophisticated through the use of this technology. So it's interesting as we reflect back on the last three, four years but more importantly start looking to the future. Gartner is predicting the use of what's called guardian AI and it's basically AI to make sure AI is doing what AI is supposed to do. So it's kind of like I often get asked are we closer to Skynet or are we closer to the matrix? I'm not quite sure yet which way we're heading but it is quite interesting to see the development. As we continue to move forward with generative AI though I think there's a lot of exciting use cases. I think it will bring efficiency into the state government processes and we do have a number of initiatives underway here in the state and North Carolina already. So as much as public sectors portrayed as being behind the curve if you will and adoption rate I don't think we're that far behind from private sector but we do have to take a risk-based approach because the sensitivity of the data that we house here in North Carolina and the 10.5 million people of residents of this state are looking for us to keep them protected. And go ahead. Absolutely. Well I just want to hone in on one thing that you just said a second ago Jim and that's you know you kind of I think accurately pointed out the light side of the force and the dark side of the force and I'm so curious if you could share some examples of use cases that you think are positive or some that you've maybe seen away from. Yeah I can talk. I can talk. Let's focus on the positive not necessarily the negative especially the holiday season here upcoming. Right now what I see from my colleagues and thus here in North Carolina as well as we're doing a call a lot of intelligent
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