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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?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday October 14 2016, @03:14PM
That might be nice yeah, but a huge improvement that could be implemented much easier would be the use of revision control for all laws. But that would make too much sense.
This is already implemented in very inefficient ways, though online databases have improved things a lot. Frequently with online legal databases you can click on a hyperlink to connect you to previous versions of a statute (which are generally mentioned when a law is changed to a newer version). Much better than the older system of following a trail of cross-references through dozens of physical books. In some ways, it would be impossible to have our legal code without a revision history of sorts, since statutes often have amendment statutes ("Paragraph 3(c) part 6 the word 'chicken' is deleted and replaced with the phrase 'poultry of all kinds'..."), and the only way to produce a current "up-to-date" version of the legal code is through compilation of those revisions. Effectively, the "law" already often really consists of version 1.0 plus a bunch of "changelogs."
But yes, I agree we need to improve the implementation.