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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: 2) by darkfeline on Friday October 14 2016, @05:21PM
Did no one pay attention to what happened to Ethereum? It allows you to write financial contracts in code. Guess what happened.
"In June 2016, The DAO, a platform for the autonomous governance of investment capital, was found to contain an unexpected code path which would allow any sophisticated user to withdraw an arbitrary amount of funds from the DAO. This was indeed exploited by an unknown party on the 16th of June, who managed to move about one third of the Ether held then by the DAO (at the time valued at 50 million USD) into a clone of the DAO, a "ChildDAO" whose control was held by only this party.[12][13] As a consequence of the way the DAO was programmed, these moved funds would remain unavailable for withdrawal for about a month.[14]"
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