If AI is going to be regulated those regulations should be debated in public and based upon the resulting laws passed by the legislative process and not determined by royal decree.
Whether that’s abuse or not I am not equipped to say with any confidence. I’d be curious to understand why you think this particular case is one of abusing executive authority and when an EO might not be such a case?
Well of course as you point out, EOs have gone from single digits, to double-digits, to thousands, and now down to hundreds per POTUS.
Contextually, I think it's a very reasonable (and commonly held, in the academic world) take that the EOs have also gotten far more legislative and legal. This is partly (but only partly) owing to administrative deference delegated by congress.
It's also somewhat specific to technological innovations, which some EOs have sought to occupy the field on before the lumbering process of congress can respond. And it's not limited to published EOs either, but many executive actions, especially in the White House OLC. This was very obvious during the W. Bush administration as regards the (Lotus Domino) email system in place at that time (which was the topic of my thesis, so it kinda serves as a temporal landmark in my consideration of this issue, but I do genuinely think it was a new frontier in executive overreach and obfuscation of interests in terms of how the White House has approached its interactions with the internet).
> I don't think the allowed shapes of formed metal should be regulated either.
I hear you. I collect knives as a hobby, and always have some kind of a cutting tool on me - they solve a surprising amount of little day-to-day problems (unpacking things bought in a shop being a prime example). I lost one of my folders to the UK border guard because, while a 6.5 cm blade was OK, they said its locking mechanism is illegal in the country. What's particularly funny is that I was actually trying to get back to France then - when entering, nobody asked about any knives. I never got that one back. :(
I wish I knew what the people who wrote this law thought. A folder without a locking mechanism is just as dangerous to others in violent scenarios, but way more dangerous for the user in typical EDC tasks. In Poland, there is no limit on the length of the blade nor on the locking mechanism. Technically, carrying an automatic foldable scythe or a zweihander is legal; you can't, however, carry a sword-cane or any other blade that is disguised as another item, like an umbrella. To put that all in perspective: in both countries, just like almost everywhere else in the developed world, the most lethal type of knife is the good old kitchen knife - ubiquitous, solid, with a tip ideal for thrusts, with a handle that protects the user's hand during the thrust, and so on. Such knives are generally not within the scope of knife-related laws.
So yeah, I don't get the logic behind the knife regulations at all. I'm not sure if completely dropping all of them is the way to go, but they would definitely benefit from a rational reevaluation. As an example, making the locking mechanism mandatory, instead of banned, would have no impact on knife-related deaths while allowing quite a few people each year to actually still have all their fingers.
I'm afraid a similar thing will happen with LLMs and later AIs. Regulators will "compromise" and focus on some kind of danger that's not entirely impossible, but also not very probable (assassins with blades in umbrellas...?), will fight for months over semantics, then pass the regulations to absolutely no visible effect - and the really dangerous uses will become either normalized or at least will move to the gray zone. The judiciary will try its best to apply existing laws to new situations, and in some cases, that will inevitably fail. We'll all deal with the consequences of these failures, unfortunately.
