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Replacing Laws Written in Natural Language with Code

posted by martyb on Friday October 14 2016, @09:47AM   
from the move-it-to-github-and-run-blame dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Gottfried Leibniz — who died 300 years ago this November — worked on many things. But a theme that recurred throughout his life was the goal of turning human law into an exercise in computation. Of course, as we know, he didn't succeed. But three centuries later, I think we're finally ready to give it a serious try again. And I think it's a really important thing to do — not only because it'll enable all sorts of new societal opportunities and structures, but also because I think it's likely to be critical to the future of our civilization in its interaction with artificial intelligence.

Human law, almost by definition, dates from the very beginning of civilization — and undoubtedly it's the first system of rules that humans ever systematically defined. Presumably it was a model for the axiomatic structure of mathematics as defined by the likes of Euclid. And when science came along, "natural laws" (as their name suggests) were at first viewed as conceptually similar to human laws, except that they were supposed to define constraints for the universe (or God), rather than for humans.

What's your favorite law, written as code?

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Original Submission

• Ignorant naivete. Ignorant naivete. (Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Friday October 14 2016, @02:16PM

  by RamiK (1813) on Friday October 14 2016, @02:16PM (#414290)

  The law is written with self-contradictions to allow lawyers and judges to interpret it like they'd want on the behalf of their paying customers. The same is done with religions and computing standards: People of interest make sure there's enough ambiguity for their own to rig the system.

  You think computing will fix things? Microsoft will teach you otherwise: The language won't be well defined. The interpreters will be proprietary and will have different implementations of undefined behavior tailored for every court. And the choice of interpreters will be left to the residing judge to achieve the ruling they desire.

  A verbal agreement, stone-tablets, paper, bytes... It makes no difference. Everything can be, and will be, corrupted to suit those in power. The best you can hope for is to put somewhat decent people in charge and keep the laws as simple as possible. Cause corruption lives between the cracks. And adding computing power just allows more corruption. Not less.

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• Re:Ignorant naivete. (Score: 2) by fishybell on Friday October 14 2016, @04:19PM

  by fishybell (3156) on Friday October 14 2016, @04:19PM (#414350)

  People of interest make sure there's enough ambiguity for their own to rig the system.

  They've never done that before. Why would they start now?

  Parent