The first effort to regulate AI was a spectacular failure

But that's not what happened. Flash forward 18 months and the end of the process couldn't be more dissimilar from its start. The nervous energy had been replaced with exhaustion. Our optimism that we'd be able to provide an outline for the ways that the New York City government should be using automated decision systems gave way to a fatalistic belief that we may not be able to tackle a problem this big after all. The people in this room were going to decide what role AI should play and what safeguards we should have."