Tomorrow, Oct. 5, all 51 members of the City Council will sit for a rare Committee of the Whole hearing on artificial intelligence. Speaker Julie Menin deserves credit for making AI safety a priority for the Council.

She has called on the heads of OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google and X to testify. Good. They should show up and answer hard questions about safety and oversight.

But I keep thinking about who else belongs in that room.

The tenant in Housing Court without a lawyer. The family whose benefits application is stuck in the system. The immigrant delivery worker on the road from morning until late at night. These New Yorkers have a stake in how AI rolls out in our city, and they deserve a seat next to the CEOs.

I know, because asking them has been my job for the past year. I direct the Artificial Intelligence Community Engagement Initiative, known as AICE, a first-of-its-kind $1 million program funded by the City........

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