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Mayor Eric Adams, like many powerful politicians who have come before him, is enchanted with new, shiny objects.
Governing is a bore. Why not let a quick-fix from the future solve all the ugly problems of today? Policing can be smoothed over with something called BolaWrap. The Ekomille can drown all the rats for us.
Adams hasn’t met a dubious gadget he won’t champion — for a little while, at least.
These days, Adams is excited about the city’s AI chatbot and scanners that can test for weapons on the subway system. Do they work? For Adams and his aides, that’s almost beside the point. The chatbot has claimed city businesses are allowed to steal workers’ tips. The chatbot has told tenants they cannot withhold rent if a landlord fails to make needed repairs. (They can.) The chatbot still thinks the city minimum wage is $15 an hour. (It rose to $16 in January.)
Ingrid Lewis-Martin, chief advisor to Adams and perhaps the most powerful bureaucrat in local government, told reporters that the chatbot should be likened to MapQuest. “Bad things were happening,” she said. “But now MapQuest is almost perfected. Same thing.”
Same thing, indeed. A private company working out the kinks on GPS software is no different than the largest municipal government in America routinely spewing false information. Lewis-Martin simply wants more time. Maybe sometime in 2026, the chatbot can figure out tenant law.
The scanners, provided by Evolv Technology, claim to mix physical detection software with AI to indicate whether someone is carrying a gun or a knife. Adams recently boasted they’ve been deployed at city hospitals and they work.
But Hell Gate found that the scanners installed at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx triggered an enormous number of false positives. Over a seven month period in 2022, 194,000 people passed through Jacobi’s scanners, and in just over 50,000 of those instances, the scanners produced an alarm — an incidence rate of about 26%. Of those 50,000 alarms, about 85% were false positives.
With time, the scanners did not improve. The alarm ratio, according to Hell Gate, never fell below 25%.
Failure, as seen with the chatbot, will not dim the Adams administration’s enthusiasm for the product. These sorts of scanners, placed randomly in the subway, could lead to numerous civil liberties violations, as police stop and frisk straphangers over false positives. There’s little evidence the scanners will ever work; the logistics of such an operation, with 472 subway stations to cover, would seem to make it all the more impossible. Imagine, for a moment, Evolv scanners ringing out with false positives in the middle of Penn Station.
The chatbot, weapons scanners and other technologies all fit a certain pattern for Adams. With his administration failing to adequately govern the city — few new policy initiatives of note have emanated from City Hall in more than two years — and patronage hires mucking up key agencies, they amount to brief distractions, failed charm offensives aimed at voters who have probably moved on. Adams is already the most unpopular mayor in modern times. A chatbot won’t save him.
What might, ultimately, is political inertia. Incumbents usually win re-election. Adams, barring an indictment or conviction in an ongoing corruption investigation, will run for mayor again next year, and he could very well triumph. His lone challenger so far, former city comptroller Scott Stringer, is a Democrat he already beat. Others might run, including Andrew Cuomo, but there’s a scenario where indictments never come and Adams manages a second term.
Or Adams can become the first one-term mayor since David Dinkins, who at least had the excuse of governing in an era of higher crime and racial strife, and trying to fend off a charismatic reactionary in Rudy Giuliani. Most of Adams’ political wounds are self-inflicted. The chatbot won’t win any converts.
Ross Barkan is a journalist and author in New York City.
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Ross Barkan , 2024-04-08 18:23:23
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