A proposed merger between Dominion Energy and NextEra Energy raises new possibilities and further questions in the race to match Virginia’s booming energy demand.
NextEra, which seeks to create the world’s largest regulated electric utility business through the $67 billion acquisition, has framed the plan as a path toward reducing energy costs in an era of rising need, driven in part by the construction of new data centers to power AI.
Last week, we asked ARLnow readers a straightforward question: if given a binary choice, would you rather see Arlington County raise taxes or cut services in next year’s budget?
Of the more than 1,200 votes counted as of this morning, about two-thirds favor cutting services, while the remaining third would rather see another tax hike.
The County Board, in the budget it adopted last month, went the other way and raised the property tax rate by two cents to preserve the Cherrydale library, the county’s competitive gymnastics program and the Barcroft Sports & Fitness Center, among other items in the budget.
Baked into that poll, however, was an assumption: that the primary levers available to the Board are tax rates and service levels.
There’s likely no easy, conventional way to squeeze much additional productivity out of the county government machinery — already relatively technology forward in its approach and having undergone years of trimming around the margins. But there’s at least one other possibility on the table: doing more with less by leaning on a technology that has been reshaping just about everything else.
Arlington County government has already started experimenting with artificial intelligence. Last summer, the county quietly rolled out AVA — the Arlington Virtual Assistant — a chatbot connected to the main county website plus specialized sites for the library system, elections and Arlington Transit. Residents can use it to ask questions about parking tickets, library card fees and the like. Before that, the county implemented AI-enabled routing of non-emergency calls.
That’s a modest start. The broader question is whether AI tools could eventually take on heavier lifts — automating permit reviews, responding to public records requests and other service queries, summarizing public comments, coding backend county systems, or handling other back-office work that today requires county staff.
All of that is possible with existing AI technology — and happening at business large and small — it’s just a matter of implementing it effectively and being willing to weather the inevitable blowback. At a time when there’s a lot of AI skepticism, even small-scale uses of the technology in a public setting — for instance, W-L’s plan to have AI read names at high school graduation — quickly become controversial.
The skeptics’ case ranges from doubts about AI’s actual capabilities to concerns about environmental and social impacts. AI systems can also be biased, can hallucinate confidently wrong answers and can carry significant privacy implications when fed government data. Replacing experienced civil servants with software risks degrading services in ways that aren’t obvious until something goes wrong.
Still, with another tough budget year on the horizon and personnel costs a major driver of county spending, it’s worth asking whether efficiency-via-AI is an option locals would theoretically support, if it meant being able to avoid service cuts and tax hikes.
Arlington Public Schools has rescinded a plan to have Washington-Liberty High School graduates’ names read by artificial intelligence during next month’s graduation ceremony.
Christina Arpante, the school system’s communications director, told ARLnow the decision was made after students “expressed a preference for having their names read by a familiar voice.”
At least one local high school will use artificial intelligence to provide clearer and faster name pronunciation during its graduation ceremony in June.
In an online letter to the school community, Washington-Liberty High School principal Alexander Duncan III said the school has partnered with Tassel to provide better announcements of graduates’ names as they cross the stage to collect diplomas.
A company that uses self-driving robots to deliver food, groceries and online purchases has begun mapping out the streets and sidewalks of Arlington County.
Avride, a Massachusetts-based company that produces autonomous cars in addition to delivery bots, has deployed at least one “personal delivery device” to chart a two-mile radius in the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor. The initial phase is expected to last for about two weeks, according to a county webpage about the devices.
A panel discussion on AI in the classroom and beyond is coming to Arlington Public Schools, supporting efforts to keep pace with the developing technology.
Superintendent Francisco Durán will moderate the community conversation next Tuesday, April 7. Educators, students and leaders in higher education and the workplace will “talk candidly about what AI means for teaching and learning right now,” Chief Academic Officer Gerald Mann said in an email to teachers.
Arlington has a new publicly traded company after a local AI cloud computing platform completed a merger with a California-based health technology firm last week.
Virginia Square-based Corvex finalized a reverse merger with Movano Inc. — a group that develops “wearable solutions” for users to track their personal health data — last Thursday. Movano is now called “Corvex” and remains under the “MOVE” symbol on the Nasdaq Stock Market.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) hopes to maintain national competitiveness on AI while preparing the U.S. economy for potentially massive disruptions brought on by new technology.
Speaking yesterday (Monday) at the grand opening of a new Ballston office for the cybersecurity company KnowBe4, which focuses on human and AI risk management, the senator emphasized the need to prepare for sweeping technological changes and their impacts on society.
Weeks after Facebook suspended a longstanding group where Arlingtonians shared memories of growing up in the county, the group has been restored.
“I Grew Up in Arlington, VA” was back online as of yesterday (Monday) morning, co-moderators Eric Dobson and David Tyskowski told ARLnow.
Moderators are crying foul over the removal of a popular, longstanding Facebook group where Arlingtonians have shared memories of growing up in the county.
“I Grew Up in Arlington,” a 15-year-old group with about 25,000 members, went dark last week after Facebook took it down and disabled some users’ accounts. The company reportedly accused them of violating standards against solicitation of children — claims that moderators strenuously deny.
Amazon is slashing about 14,000 jobs, but the company’s HQ2 in Pentagon City will mostly be spared, ARLnow is told.
The company said in a Tuesday letter to employees that it is laying off thousands of corporate workers to reduce bureaucracy and “realize efficiency gains” in “this generation of AI.”
A free event on the future of artificial intelligence is taking place in Crystal City this weekend, resulting in a few road closures.
Programming for “AI Unlocked” begins at 10 a.m. on Friday at the Alamo Drafthouse (1660 Crystal Drive). That morning will feature a conversation on AI policy with U.S. Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.), followed by an afternoon discussion on “tech frontiers.”
