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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 14 2016, @05:45PM
This is a dumb idea for various reasons, but I'll point out one no one has mentioned yet: Programming languages are for computers. Human languages are for people. Why the fuck would you propose communicating with humans through computer languages instead of through human languages? That just doesn't make any sense.
it'll enable all sorts of new societal opportunities and structures
WTF? It'll do no such thing. The same laws, written in a different format, are the same laws. On paper in whatever language or online in whatever language doesn't change what you can do in the physical world. You're not proposing codifying current laws into the fabric of reality, you're talking about changing the media they're stored in. Doing that has no effect on how they're applied, only how they're learned.
it's likely to be critical to the future of our civilization in its interaction with artificial intelligence
It won't be. A true AI will be able to understand us on our level. If for some reason that AI is dumber than us, then we'd treat it as a child and it wouldn't need to know all our laws. If that AI ends up super smart then it'll be able to understand whatever we do. If that AI is at average human intelligence then it'll be taught just like humans are. We're not going to have true AIs that are codified to be our slaves. History shows us again and again and again why this is a bad idea.
So again, this is all just a stupid idea if you take any moments to think about it. The only reason you might want to codify the laws is to create realistic, computerized simulations of the real world. But at that point, any sane software engineer would design a parser for our human language based laws and the simulation system would be able to understand them in human language form.