The Government Doesn't Have the Roofing Permit AI

I’ve been collaborating with a county in Oregon that wants to adopt AI. They have zero AI right now. The problem is straightforward.

You need a roofing permit. You give it to your AI. Your AI fills out the paperwork, handles the back and forth, does it perfectly. But the government doesn’t have the roofing permit AI. You want to file a Freedom of Information request. Give it to your AI. But the government doesn’t have a way to handle the influx. So the government gets more and more inbound because people can. And they don’t have a way to manage it. So they’re ineffective.

No big deal when your roof permit is just taking longer than it should. But then something bad happens. A disaster, a crisis. And the government doesn’t have the right level of preparedness. It’s using a very antiquated approach to operations at the exact moment that citizens are supercharged with AI capabilities.

This is the asymmetry that worries me. The demand side is about to explode. Every citizen with an AI assistant can now generate paperwork, file requests, and navigate bureaucracy at a speed and volume that was previously impossible. The supply side, the government’s ability to process and respond, hasn’t moved at all.

Governments are slow by design. They dampen the influx of requests through burden. Construction permits, civil disputes, licensing. It’s generally not tasteful for the government to manage demand using price discrimination directly. So they achieve the same thing indirectly by making processes more complex, which means they often require professional assistance, which makes them more expensive. The complexity is the feature, not the bug.

But now my AI can do paperwork. The complexity barrier is gone. So the government gets slammed. And neither the government AIs, if they eventually get them, nor the citizen AIs will care about the length and complexity of a form. The whole notion of complexifying process stops having a purpose.

I want AI adoption in the government because if the government doesn’t adopt AI, it’s going to be much less capable of dealing with difficult circumstances. Politicians should be thinking about this. Not just for their constituents, but for themselves. The institutions they run are about to face a flood they are not equipped to handle.

And the stakes go beyond paperwork. If we end up with Great Depression-level unemployment, if class tensions rise, if social services get overwhelmed, the government needs to be operating at a level of competence that matches the moment. You can’t respond to an AI-accelerated crisis with a fax machine.