The article is a poorly argued response to a strawman. The NYC and federal advisory councils would be tasked with providing lawmakers with impartial advice on

The article is a poorly argued response to a strawman. The NYC and federal advisory councils would be tasked with providing lawmakers with impartial advice on A.I. writ large. That's reasonable. Bias in algorithmic credit decisions and bias in algorithmic sentencing are different problems, but share a lot of the same underlying technological realities/problems. These areas do have cross-cutting concerns, so a legislative brain trust dedicated to disseminating knowledge about these cross-cutting concerns is a wise use of resources. No one is suggesting "regulating" general AI, so the author's red herring question about "what is AI anyways?" is completely off-topic. Even "alarmists" like Musk and Hawking are proposing much more concrete legislation, such as banning algorithmically generated kill orders in weapons. And to the extent that those people are interested in safe general AI, they're currently trying to achieve that goal by throwing research money at it (rather than proposing concrete legislation regulating general AI). Which is hardly a reasonable thing to criticize! Furthermore, the proposed approaches in NYC and at the federal level aren't incongruent with the author's proposed sector-by-sector approach toward regulation! These are, after all, simply proposing advisory councils. Therefore, the author does not provide a compelling reason to oppose any of the concrete legislation mentioned at the beginning of the article. And the arguments that the author does make betray, IMO, a superficial understanding of the proposed legislation.