Pivot to AI: Let's vibe-regulate US transport with Gemini!

[xocetaceans]

Trump Administration

Government by AI? Trump Administration Plans to Write Regulations Using Artificial Intelligence
The Transportation Department, which oversees the safety of airplanes, cars and pipelines, plans to use Google Gemini to draft new regulations. “We don’t need the perfect rule,” said DOT’s top lawyer. “We want good enough.”

by Jesse Coburn
January 26, 2026, 5:30 am

The Trump administration is planning to use artificial intelligence to write federal transportation regulations, according to U.S. Department of Transportation records and interviews with six agency staffers.

The plan was presented to DOT staff last month at a demonstration of AI’s “potential to revolutionize the way we draft rulemakings,” agency attorney Daniel Cohen wrote to colleagues. The demonstration, Cohen wrote, would showcase “exciting new AI tools available to DOT rule writers to help us do our job better and faster.”

Discussion of the plan continued among agency leadership last week, according to meeting notes reviewed by ProPublica. Gregory Zerzan, the agency’s general counsel, said at that meeting that President Donald Trump is “very excited about this initiative.” Zerzan seemed to suggest that the DOT was at the vanguard of a broader federal effort, calling the department the “point of the spear” and “the first agency that is fully enabled to use AI to draft rules.”

Zerzan appeared interested mainly in the quantity of regulations that AI could produce, not their quality. “We don’t need the perfect rule on XYZ. We don’t even need a very good rule on XYZ,” he said, according to the meeting notes. “We want good enough.” Zerzan added, “We’re flooding the zone.”

. . .

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-artificial-intelligence-google-gemini-transportation-regulations

As noted by the video, the article reports that the FAA has an unpublished rule (for now) which was written by AI. How safe will flying (and the other modes of transportation) be if safety rules are to be implemented as something akin to AI slop?

[struggle4progress]

1. Much of what the current President says seems to be the product of simulated rather than actual

intelligence, but this does not suggest that the actual work (needed to keep a modern technical civilisation functioning) can be replaced by mere simulated intelligence