Gov. Mikie Sherrill thinks AI’s explosion into the economy shows the era of government getting out of the way is over.
“I have this sense that since Reagan came up with this idea that you get government out of the way and everybody flourishes, we’ve come to the logical end of that,” Sherrill said Wednesday at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City.
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Sitting next to Verizon CEO Dan Schulman at the launch of the company’s $70 million Verizon AI Skills for America initiative, the governor traced crumbling infrastructure, a broken health care system and public fear of AI to the same root: decades of government stepping back.
AI, she told the crowd of about 250, is where that has to change.
Sherrill described the AI economy as a three-legged stool: business leaders, technology innovators and scientists — and government. What’s missing, she said, is the third leg: “government asleep at the wheel, not providing that support for communities on the downside risks of all of these new technologies.”
Her fix isn’t simply more government. It’s better government.
“We don’t just need government; we need effective government,” she said. “We need people who are capable and focused and care about the people and not serving themselves but serving the people.”
Even the tech industry is asking for it, Sherrill said, pointing to AI companies’ own calls for regulation.
“When have you heard of huge tech industries asking, begging even for regulation?” she said. “That’s where we’re at right now.”
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Sherrill offered New Jersey as the example of what effective government looks like.
On data centers, the state has put guardrails in place so communities “have a voice in the future of their community,” she said, and so they benefit from community benefits agreements rather than being penalized.
On education, she said the state’s economy depends on schools turning out a high-end workforce, and she isn’t satisfied with where they are after COVID.
“Third grade reading is not where I want it to be. Eighth grade math is not where I want it to be,” she said. “And we know how to fix those things.”
Her answer is evidence-based, high-dose tutoring, along with a careful look at whether AI can help extend it to more students. The state is also putting AI into the curriculum so students are ready for jobs that don’t exist yet.
The state has also invested in the New Jersey AI Hub, which it founded with Princeton, Microsoft and CoreWeave to help schools, companies and government keep pace with the technology.
And Sherrill said government has to protect people through the transition itself, so residents don’t lose their jobs or find themselves unable to pay their utility bills as AI’s demand for power grows.
To get there, she said, her administration has organized around a mission, “so that we have all of our different cabinet departments working together on that mission, so that we can deliver better.”
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Sherrill said the stakes go beyond policy. Many residents, she said, simply don’t believe AI will be good for them.
“I think they think there are going to be some technology companies in Silicon Valley that are going to do very, very well,” she said. “I’m not sure they believe they’re going to do very well in this transition, and they might feel that way because they’ve not seen the power of good, well-run government.”
It wasn’t always that way, she said. In the 1960s, when government worked, Americans looked at new technology, saw the Jetsons and were excited, confident it would make their own lives better.
Sherrill said she still sees that kind of excitement in the small business owners she talks to around the state, people who start companies to create, to help their communities or to see a vision through.
“Entrepreneurship is hard. People don’t do it because they want easy,” she said.
That’s where government comes in, she said, by taking some of the risk out, especially for innovative companies that can go years without making money.
“You need really good government if people are going to flourish in this time period of transition,” she said.
Sherrill acknowledged she keeps coming back to the same theme: better government.
“I know I sound like a broken record,” she said.
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Schulman didn’t argue the point. He built on it.
“I do think there’s huge power in public-private partnership,” he said. “I think on the private sector, we need to step up to our responsibility. We control that, and we need to step up.”
But whether at the federal or state level, he said, “the power of that partnership together is what will unleash the opportunity.”
Sherrill said if New Jersey gets it right, AI could free people to do amazing things.
AI, she said, could take over rote work, like the thankless hours young lawyers spend combing through legal citations, and free people for creative work, from mock trials to building new businesses.
“This can free up the human race to do amazing things and to solve amazing problems,” she said.
Her job, Sherrill said, is to get to that vision “and not the downside.”
“We need government in this space to have the back of the people that we serve,” she said.
