breaking this morning after years of starts and stops the Biden Administration throws its support behind a Dallas to Houston highspeed train we believe in this obviously it has to turn into a more specific design and vision but everything I've seen makes me very excited about this in studio Transportation secretary Pete budes we ask him about the land owners in the path and then artificial intelligence will shape this year's election propaganda propaganda is about dividing and conquering it's ab
out trying to get people to disagree we explore its impact and get answers from the top state lawmaker on the issue that and more just [Music] ahead this is lonar politics from NBC 5 and the Dallas Morning News from the impact of artificial intelligence to a major development in a story we've covered for years this morning we focus on the future good Sunday morning I'm Phil praisin from NBC 5 and I'm gromer Jeffers political writer with the Dallas Morning News we start with Transportation secret
ary Pete budage for the first time we hear his support for a bullet train between Dallas and Houston he came to Dallas earlier this week for a different project to unveil a $80 million investment through the reconnecting communities program the money will go towards four projects creating new green spaces and walkways built over highways one will expand what's already at Clyde Moren Park then another one at I30 on i35e and along Highway 5 in mcken it's from the bipartisan infrastructure law pass
ed during the first year of the Biden Administration secretary budes joins us in the studio to detail Transportation plans for North Texas the symbolism is important but what about the Practical value as well I mean how well the way I think of it is that the the purpose of transportation is to connect that's what roads and and Pathways and trails are all about but the reality is sometimes Transportation wound up dividing too the railways or highways that went in through a neighborhood often a ne
ighborhood that didn't have the economic or political clout to try to change that project and wound up cutting that neighborhood into too uh the point is we can do something about that you know nobody in charge today is responsible for some of those decisions that were made in the ' 50s 60s and70s but we're all responsible for what we do next and we can create value with as you said a practical benefit as well as I think a a benefit in terms of Justice just doing the right thing for these neighb
orhoods that have such an impact because of how Transportation affected them I want your thoughts on on a project that we've been covering for years here a high-speed train from Dallas to Houston and uh recently it it became a Amtrak project recently it was part of it was named as part of the corridor ID program which I understand is kind of like a watch list for maybe future Federal funding do you support that program I think there is enormous potential in this vision and I'll tell you why Ju J
ust the Way That the population is laid out in this part of Texas where you have uh two major population centers that are a long drive or a very short flight away from each other that's excellent candidate for High-Speed Rail uh we see that all over the world but the US frankly has been behind other countries when it comes to highspeed rail we're working to change that now this is not something you can do overnight but as you mentioned we've added this to the corridor ID programming uh putting s
ome of those early federal dollars in to help get the planning really get it on the drawing board and I've had conversations with Amtrak they're very excited about the potential here too so is it fair to say that you are supportive of the project uh we believe in this yeah look obviously it has to into a more specific design and vision but everything I've seen makes me very excited about this uh two similar programs LA to Las Vegas and then LA to San Francisco both got about $3 billion what do y
ou need to see from the project to get get that kind of money here for this project well as you can imagine it takes a lot to build a high-speed Railway it takes a lot to build any Railway uh the uh projects that you mentioned are further along in their development the California north south one is already under construction the one that's going to run from Las Vegas to Southern California is exciting because uh it's a public private partnership you've got uh uh private investors backing that bu
t they couldn't get it done without a big Federal commitment too so we're helping get that over the top they're hoping to have that done in time for the Olympics in LA in 2028 and I I really believe that the first time anybody somewhere in America sees true High-Speed Rail there's going to be no going back and people are going to want it all around the country and I'll tell you looking all around the country uh one of the most uh interesting promising projects to come next is that Texas central
vision biggest push back from the project has come from the land owners in between Dallas and Houston a court decision just gave the project eminent domain do you support using that on this project and how do you think about eminent domain in general anytime you're building anything Highway Railway you name it you've got to do right by the land owners who could be impacted it's up to the project sponsor to do that uh if there's a concern about their rights being violated we will come in and make
sure that everybody's rights are upheld these are challenging things it's it's part of what it takes to get something built but I do think there's enormous promise in this Vision let's talk about bridges I heard you you say a couple of days ago the the tragedy in Maryland it's hard to do something about a ship hitting a bridge like that I mean it's going to come down but there are bridges across the country in Dallas there are five bridges on the list of most vulnerable what can be done or what
is being done to to get those bridges up to standard you this is one of the biggest reasons why President Biden pushed so aggressively for an infrastructure package is one of the first things that this Administration did and the biggest category out of that entire infrastructure package in transportation is roads highways and bridges we got far too many bridges and roads in this country that have slipped into poor condition that are vulnerable for any number of reasons and we've got to recogniz
e not only do you just have to take care of wear and tear but there are new and accelerating threats we have to not just maintain our infrastructure we got to make it more resilient for the future and I think we're going to learn a lot of lessons out of what happened in Baltimore that will affect the next generation of how bridges are designed and built the city of Dallas has notoriously dangerous roads uh our investigative team here has kind of really shined the spotlight on that on some of the
problems in the city of Dallas one of the projects or one of the most dangerous roads is MLK Boulevard it just received $20 million from the federal government or at least an announcement was made the uh city transportation director said that he hasn't seen you know a firm signed agreement and it said says it usually takes about two years from that announcement in Washington DC to be on the ground here in Dallas why does it take so long and should it be taken that long Yeah you mentioned two th
ings I'm very focused on one of them is shortening the time between an award announcement and a grant agreement look of course there are a lot of steps you got to go through we're talking about Federal taxpayer money you got to make sure that that that it is uh set up in an accountable way but we can't be waiting around especially because projects get more expensive each passing day until you actually break ground so I'm trying to compress the amount of time from from the press release to the gr
oundbreaking the other reason this is so urgent is when it comes to Traffic Safety uh we can't move uh quickly enough to to have some of these design improvements this is maybe the biggest Transportation crisis that nobody talks about uh when think about what we're doing in aviation after that plug door came out of that airplane we are moving Heaven and Earth contemplating our entire approach to oversight uh because an incident happened where somebody could have been badly hurt meanwhile more th
an a hundred people die every single day on America's roads now we saw that rate go down by about 1% last year that 1% alone represents about 400 lives but clearly we've got a long way to go as a country and I applaud local leaders who are contemplating those better roadway designs that can help it's why we're committing federal dollars I want to ask you about electric vehicles more and more on the road is the infrastructure in this country where it needs to be in terms of charging stations what
ever you need to make make the experience Pleasant for people who are buying and and using those Vehicles well here's what we're seeing every year more Americans choose to go electric and of course we we support that because we want to make sure America leads the way in this EV Revolution but you cannot run tomorrow's cars on today grid that means the electrical grid needs to be upgraded we need to get more Chargers out there now a lot of people in this region live in a single family home maybe
with a garage in that case charging is relatively easy for you you can just plug it into the wall but if you're driving longer distances or if you live in a multif family dwelling you don't just have a garage your own house you're going to need another solution and that's why through the president's infrastructure plan we are funding every part of the country with about 7.5 billion to get those Chargers built the goal is 500,000 Chargers by the end of this decade secretary thanks for joining us
this morning thank you great to be with you social media forever changed politics in the mid 2000s will artificial intelligence have the same far-reaching impact many are worried what it may bring I travel to Austin to understand more the future is here ready or not it's a little embarrassing you know reminds me this is not Tom Cruz but a fake video of him built through artificial intelligence it's not in a public address but this is not former president Obama but a preview of the days ahead fak
e pictures of former president Trump and manipulated audio of President Biden are already online without doing very much work at all almost anyone can produce a piece of political propaganda that may be convincing to voters zeli Martin is one of about 30 people working with the University of Texas's propaganda research lab in Austin collecting analyzing and publicizing examples of artificial intelligence in impacting elections the bottom line I think very often is no one wants to be manipulated
right so that's kind of like where we can find a common ground the team is led by Dr in TR and Dr Sam wooy they're trying to avoid what happened nearly 20 years ago with the emergence of social media vastly understudied until its world changing impacts were already reality there was so much excitement about its Democratic potential and not as much thought about how it might be used by authoritarian regimes and by people that were working to manipulate public opinion or stifle free spe downsides
the downsides which are big right their team is monitoring how major companies like open AI Microsoft and meta roll out their technology aiming to bring accountability and I think personally for holding accountable actors that are involved in this if it's private companies so just by sitting down and explaining how some of the information manipulation is happening on which platform which which tools you like just provide information can be really helpful the beginnings of that idea are already i
n the works last month the US Department of Commerce released this report calling on companies local state and National lawmakers to quote expose problems and potential risks and to hold responsible entities to account Department staff hopes the government will give guidance on best practices require people to disclose when they're using Ai and keep legal liability so people can file lawsuits against Bad actors you also can't uh steal people's identities in this country you can't uh you can't de
fame people and those are laws that of existed and so in some ways we treat it as if we need to reinvent the wheel with social media and create these new laws really in my in my view what we need to do is hold people accountable for the same laws we've always had and uh but just do it online one recent example which worries this team runs through North Texas the New Hampshire attorney general named an Arlington man and Company behind the AI generated OBO calls of President Biden falsely urging v
oters to stay home during the state's primary election voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in a statement to nbc5 the AG's office had no comment because the investigation is ongoing some of this Innovation For Better or Worse is happening in our state and so we need to think deeply about what that means for both Texas and for American democracy in Austin the Texas house just created a select committee on AI to come up with changes in law in Jan January 2025 when the legislative sess
ion begins that comes after the 2024 presidential election when artificial intelligence may play a key role in the outcome state representative giovan Capri Leon joins us this morning he represents South Lake and is chair of the new select committee on AI in the Texas house he's also the co-chair of the state Advisory board on the issue thank you for being here this morning yeah thanks for having me appreciate it let's continue the conversation about elections first so somebody you're a republic
an somebody creates a video of you saying Donald Trump is terrible and I'm voting for Joe Biden and spreads it around the internet should that be uh legal to do no I in fact just anytime there's a major technological risk uh Advance there's risks that'll come with it and so obviously with elections is some of the things that we're worried about uh deep fakes changing people's audios uh even just creating new tweets and all that kind of stuff is is a potential risk to not just the candidates but
also to the voters themselves and the question would be though how do you even stop it especially in in a situation where it would take so long to unravel that it could do damage before an election yeah I mean what we're going to have to do is obviously first create laws that go and let people know that there's risk if they go and there's actual punitive fines or or criminal penalties if they do that and so that helps that also then goes to the providers right people that distribute that content
whether it's the social media companies or whether it's the email providers they need to know know that there are certain things that they shouldn't be allowed to transmit or distribute there used to be a time when all you had to worry about was that last minute male or mysterious male or coming like on the eve of election day or something but now it's much more complex than that right and the complexity is because it can be custom tailored and it can seem so real we've all seen those Nigerian
email things and they see the typos and the spelling but now we're at the level where someone can see look at your social media profile they can see who your friends are and then they can even look to to emulate their voices or their images and so you would it'd be easier to convince you or to trick you as well and it can happen like you said at the last minute yeah so your committee is going to be looking at you know legal penalties and and maybe saying uh giving them legal liability so if this
bad actor does this you could get sued by a campaign or anybody that's right we're looking at a whole host of different uh potential legislation uh we have the advisory Council that is going to be more focused on state agencies for instance and how AI used in government but we're also going to be looking at private companies and and rules and regulations for those and those will come with um you know potential penalties if they don't follow those rules but also guard rails right I think all of
us want this technology to succeed it's incredibly Innovative we want this to happen in Texas but at the same time we want to mitigate those risks yeah there's also the positive side right any thoughts on how AI could really work for Texas and work in terms of what you you guys are doing well uh we had our first AI advisory council meeting and we had four different state agencies talk about how it's already being used in our state agency so one example for instance is texto is looking uh they di
d a pilot and they're doing a pilot where they're keeping cameras on at traffic and they're using AI to say okay there's been an accident let's immediately deploy tow trucks or help or assistance over there that's already reduced the amount of time that people are waiting 5 to 10 minutes right so we see that they're using it on more boring things like taking care of their invoices it used to take about 3 weeks to handle invoices at text Dot very manual they've got it down to 26 seconds now and p
robably a lot more accurate so we see a lot of values on how it can be more efficient how it can provide more benefits to more constituents without costing taxpayers more so how do you how do you look at it from the from the spectrum of the robots are going to become self-aware and kill us all to a new age of peace and prosperity how are you feeling on it uh 50/50 uh you know there's a lot of potential benefits but I think if you look through history there's always been these big techn logical c
hanges and I like to think about it when we first started doing the Manhattan Project and and coming up with nuclear weapons there's a lot of people afraid right and and it we were able to go and create rules and regulations create new assemblies and bodies that could have those conversations diplomacy and all of that that has obviously not resulted in the negative part of it we have an opportunity now to look at that and say let's start making those rules now let's start having those conversati
ons with stakeholders we we do want Texas to lead on this we do want this technology to help people it is going to save people's lives right I mean just the advances in medicine that this will provent uh protect and a way that you'll be able to save money in a lot of different things but there are risks to privacy I mean this takes a lot of data and a lot of information to train these models with that data comes a risk that there will be cyber baches or that there are cyber security and cyber at
tacks on there so we want to make sure that that's protected as well and then of course we want to make sure that in those fully autonomous decisions that are made without any human intervention that we SC it is it is I mean and so what one of the things that we're looking at is how do we do this in a way that we we look at each case use as risky or not risky or riskier right and then make those rules uh conform to how risky that is obviously when we're talking about weapon systems and we're tal
king about People's Health Care those are riskier we want to be more protecting of that but uh chat Bots maybe for a lot of good that you want to encourage but then you know stop the bad stuff that's right see us represent thank you very much for being here appreciate it thank you no labels is a noo late last week the bipartisan group working toward putting a third-party presidential ticket on the November 5th ballot said it had not identified a credible candidate adding the responsible course o
f action is for us to stand down the group's National Convention chair former Dallas mayor Mike Rollins appeared on this show last month and said the group isn't going anywhere this movement's going to be here things are going to change in this country so how do you feel about President Joe Biden yeah why not just support him uh over Donald Trump leave it at that look as you know I was the first big city mayor in the United States to endorse Joe Biden because I believed he could beat Trump and h
e did I'm still a big fan I'm sorry he's not going to win this time and I'm scared about what what's the alternative that's all the time we have stay tuned for Meet the Press with Kristen Welker total eclipse tomorrow where are you watching the garden spot of North Texas Andis I'll be in Dallas and we hope you all enjoyed the the total eclipse and we'll see you back here next Sunday for more Longstar politics
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