
Computational Law, Symbolic Discourse, and the AI Constitution - steven
https://backchannel.com/computational-law-symbolic-discourse-and-the-ai-constitution-d8528ee27bf0
======
sdrothrock
I can't help but completely disagree with both the idea and the probability
that this will ever happen.

Modern law is supposed to be open, so that anyone can read it. Reencoding
laws, for whatever reason, strikes me as being fundamentally undemocratic.

The argument can be made that if legal "code" is taught in schools, then it's
no more undemocratic than writing down law, but the chances of that happening
seem slim to none.

Another argument is that law is already written in "special" English that most
people can't figure out, but I think that having it in English alone is a big
step toward having it being readable by almost anyone.

It would be neat to have law written as code and to have AI be able to parse
it for you in lay language -- that is, you could ask it questions or pose
situations to get a legally-binding answer. But then the question for me is,
why don't we just have said AI read the current legalese and parse it?

~~~
tensor
Another aspect here is that people think writing contracts as code will
eliminate errors. But just look at our software, it's full of bugs. The DAO
episode is a perfect example of what will happen with contracts as code: bugs
and loopholes, just like now, but harder to address.

~~~
rdlecler1
Now imagine how buggy legal documents are when they're rewritten fresh each
time, rather than using open source libraries and subroutines.

~~~
umanwizard
Luckily things are interpreted by human judges who can use discretion and
interpret things in a sort of "do what I mean" way, so "bugginess" isn't as
big of an issue as it is in coding.

~~~
hprotagonist
this is the crux of the thing.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Well, until we reach smarter-than-human AI, you ultimately have to base
everything in society on trust. That's why I actually find the ideas around
trustless systems to be potentially dangerous.

Discretion of a human judge is grease on the gears of law.

------
jacques_chester
I remember thinking that this was a good idea, in my first year of law.

By the third year I had rather given up on the idea.

Legal writing is already well-specified. The problem is not with the language
that the law is written in. The problem is that _the world is irreducibly
complex_ and the law cannot shrink its domain from "everything humans have
done, do, will do, or could do; interacting with other humans, dead, alive,
unborn; interacting with objects, in their homes, in public, on private
property, belonging to them, belonging to others, belonging to nobody; on the
surface of the earth, underneath the earth, in the seas, in the international
seas, in the skies, in orbit, on the moon, the limits of human space; with
ideas, owned and unowned, with multiple kinds of ownership; in concert with
other legal systems, or in contrast, or in direct mutually incompatible
conflict; without limit, forever".

Which is probably a fraction of it.

Quite aside from scope, there is ordinary fuzzy logic: in coming to a
conclusion, judges must give consideration to concepts that cannot be crisply,
discretely encoded: "the buyer without notice at arm's length", the
"reasonable person, similarly circumstanced" and so forth.

These are all supported by _cases_. Mounds and mounds of cases. Case-based
reasoning is a well-explored area of AI, but it hasn't been to any avail.
Civil legal systems try to go without caselaw and have pure statute in the
fashion that this kind of idle daydream typically tries to express.

And they've had hundreds and hundreds of years to get the "perfect" drafting.
Bugs are still showing up. All that it does is shift the burden of adjustment
to a slower, central bureaucracy from a self-correcting, distributed, multi-
level system.

We still need humans to make sense of humans. For the foreseeable future this
can be expected to continue. The law isn't going anywhere.

~~~
denzil_correa
> Legal writing is already well-specified. The problem is not with the
> language that the law is written in.

I was initially happy with the title of the article but this is exactly the
reason why the content left me disappointing. It is very difficult to capture
law in a computational context and there are interesting forums these days.

That said, there are interesting questions to ask.

* What are the properties to make a law (fully/partially) computational?

* What stages of time could law be made computational? Time, number of cases etc.

* What laws could be made computational and what can not? Are there laws that could never be made computational? Are there laws that could be made fully computational? Are there laws that could be partially computational?

* What are the effects of computational law on the legal ecosystem? Would it give rise to less better lawyers and judges?

I think such questions need investigation (if not already done).

------
erispoe
Ambiguity is a feature of natural languages, it's not a bug.

It's because of this ambiguity that you can pass a law and assume other laws
will update their meaning accordingly. For instance, civil rights.

A law is an abstraction, and its meaning gets clarified or even updated when
cases occur. For instance, marriage discrimination is now unconstitutional.
The text of the constitution didn't change, its meaning did.

~~~
nercht12
> Ambiguity is a feature of natural languages, it's not a bug. It's because of
> this ambiguity that you can pass a law and assume other laws will update
> their meaning accordingly.

Which is huge problem. It means that laws can be interpreted any which way we
want, which essentially means that the law only retains its meaning for a
certain period of time until, until people forget their meaning, or judges
make enough exceptions to those laws to render them useless but "true in
principle", or judges decide at whim to change the interpretation. Since laws
can change, what reliance have we upon any of it? What guarantee do we have
that we can keep our "rights"? It's an incredibly stupid system. Is there
something better? - Not one we can implement, to say the least. So we're stuck
with it. It's not a blessing, it's a curse.

~~~
mannykannot
It is a huge and unjustified leap to go from "ambiguity is a feature of
natural languages" to "it means that laws can be interpreted any which way we
want". It is interesting that this appears in a discussion of this topic.

In reality, natural language can be precise - consider a textbook on logic,
for example. It is humans that are ambiguous, and if you force them to use a
language that has a precise meaning, they will simply write things that do not
mean exactly what they intend. We know this is so from observing how
programming errors are made.

~~~
nercht12
It's not that big of a leap. And a text book is actually a poor counter
example. Can modern Greeks read ancient Greek? No. Culture degrades language.
Gradually, words will mean something else. Consider the word "cool". How many
people these days actually associate it with temperature first? Or "ass". How
many people think "donkey"? Those are simple examples. We could go back to
older English, but I think my point has been demonstrated.

Admittedly, I keep shortening my responses before posting, so sometimes I
don't explain some logic that seems obvious to me. Apologies.

~~~
mannykannot
No one is disputing the possibility of ambiguity, but a few single-word
examples is still a long way from "interpret any way you want." If you need to
be precise about temperature or fashion or animal taxonomy or physiology, you
can be, and a textbook is a better example than the observation that few
people understand a language that is no longer in general use.

~~~
nercht12
Notably, I wasn't talking about precisely-defined textbook words. If you go
back, my original comment is directed at the fact that the Constitution can be
liberally interpreted because the meanings of words change, which is due to
cultural influence. Sure, we could go back and look at the history of America
and figure out what "right" probably meant to the founding fathers (or
"electricity" or yada yada for that matter), but to Joe Shmoe, the original
meaning is either gone or no longer relevant. The only reason certain words'
meanings don't change is because people aren't using them.

That said, I would still say natural language is, when you try to fully
examine it without relation to reality, arbitrary (in a completely different
argument), and while it doesn't mean "any which way we want" (initially), we
could make a deep philosophical examination of the topic and come to that
conclusion, but that's off topic. Though I feel like that's partly what you
may have thought I was arguing initially.

~~~
mannykannot
We can only go by what you write, and you are making a more thoughtful point
now. I do not think, however, that you can exclude "precisely defined textbook
words" when the issue is whether natural language is necessarily imprecise
(not that my textbook example is only about word definitions, FWIW.)

------
matt4077
This is contradictory:

\- A system of law is needed to settle disputes happening in the so-called
"real world".

\- Often, these disputes involve what people say.

\- The decision therefore needs to account for the meaning of what was said.

\- If you could algorithmically derive the "true meaning" of anything people
say, you could also derive the "true meaning" of any law, because both use the
same medium, i. e. "language".

-> You could just use that system to derive the "true meaning" of laws without translating into any sort of code.

------
pjbrow
The primary problem with law is the technicality of the language, aka
"legalese".

At the moment, expecting someone off the street to properly understand a legal
document is broadly equivalent to expecting them to understand what's going on
with a command line (assuming they use computers only casually).

Law needs the equivalent of a GUI.

It's possible. Some other lawyers and I are working on an open source system
of "defined phrases" that can be used like software functions. Lawyers already
define words, there's no reason you can't do the same with phrases.

Each plain english phrase represents a module of legalese that can be
manipulated with "arguments" specified in conjunction with the phrase. Like a
GUI, a comprehensible representation is there for the user, and the technical
legalese still does all the work underneath.

You can take a look at it here [http://lawpatch.org](http://lawpatch.org).
Previous HN discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10597778](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10597778)

------
jmcmichael
Two words: 'event calculus'. A type of predicate logic constructed to
precisely specify the types of relationships that we use language to do with
law and contracts:

'Formalizing Legislation in the Event Calculus':
[http://www.marcellodibello.com/files/research_files/theses/c...](http://www.marcellodibello.com/files/research_files/theses/citizenship.pdf)

Yes, it uses a library of obscure symbols to describe these relationships, but
can be algorithmically translated into any number of natural languages, thus
making these descriptions understandable to most people.

It's my belief that event calculus + blockchain (I'm looking at tauchain as an
ideal platform) to enable the construction of massively scalable, voluntary,
commons-based social coordination, production, politics and law.

------
okket
Original source: [http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/10/computational-law-
sym...](http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/10/computational-law-symbolic-
discourse-and-the-ai-constitution/)

------
kensai
Damn it. Every time I read a Stephen Wolfram entry I am so divided between if
what I read is there for its own sake or is it just another shameful plug for
his products.

I wish he could simply write for once in a neutral way. He has good messages,
even if some disagree. But makes it so distasteful by these Wolfram mentions
again and again...

~~~
nv-vn
This is how I feel too. It doesn't help that the links posted on HN always
come from another URL and the article starts out without giving any indication
of what it will be about. It feels like a bait-and-switch every time it goes
from some really interesting, difficult to tackle issue being posed to "My
product, Wolfram Language, was built to do exactly this." By the end of it,
I'm left feeling like I just read a massive advertisement.

------
kazinator
Laws are not in anything that can be called in natural language; they are in a
code called "legalese".

Legalese doesn't have to be formalized into program-like code. Rather, perhaps
into mathematical language, with some of the notations that go with it. It
needs to use clear logic, and set theoretic descriptions and reasoning. Law is
all about logic and sets: what rule applies under what conditions, and what is
included and excluded and so forth.

------
ktRolster
Reality is a fractal, thus any language that precisely represents all the
corner cases will by necessity be infinite.

(The law currently deals with this problem by only solving questions that come
before it, not by solving every potential problem.)

------
matheweis
Ethereum's smart contracts were a good example of why this probably won't
happen anytime soon...

~~~
Jtsummers
Solidity is a terrible language for designing contracts in. It's not an
effective counterexample as it seems to be such a poorly considered construct
to begin with.

~~~
mannykannot
The problem with Ethereum is not 'just' a poor language, it is the general
difficulty of verifying a Turing-complete anything.

[http://blog.paralleluniverse.co/2016/07/23/correctness-
and-c...](http://blog.paralleluniverse.co/2016/07/23/correctness-and-
complexity/)

The same applies to all 'formal law language' proposals.

~~~
Jtsummers
I didn't say the problem was "just" a poor language. I said that Solidity is a
poor example of a language for writing contracts in. I didn't say it would be
easy to develop one, certainly not a universal one. But Solidity is not a
counterexample, itself, to the idea of a "formal law language". It's just an
example of a language totally unsuited for its intended domain.

~~~
mannykannot
>I didn't say the problem was "just" a poor language.

It was the only specific point you made in support of your position.

~~~
Jtsummers
Sorry, I wrote it at 2am and my girlfriend distracted me from finishing my
thought. Maybe I shouldn't have hit "reply", but I did. Even so, a post making
one point doesn't mean it's the author's only point or what they consider
"just" the problem. Take it at face value, it was a post making a singular
point: Solidity (Ethereum's language) is a bad language for writing contracts
in, so it makes it difficult to consider Ethereum an example of problems with
formalized/programmatic contracts.

------
hprotagonist
"There can be no Justice so long as Laws are absolute".

------
grownseed
The idea itself is rather beautiful, I used to believe it was the only way
things should be, but the more I think about it and its presentation here, the
more I feel uncomfortable about it.

The contents of the article are fairly heavy on the technical side of things,
but seem to hand-wave the human aspect of the whole operation, or tend to
mostly point out human flaws and rarely qualities. I'm not sure whether it's
cynicism or me reading too much into it, but it bothers me a little.

Should this idea (and others alike) ever be implemented, I personally believe
they should only ever be decision-support systems that members of society
(humans and possibly AIs) would ultimately decide upon. Such a system would be
designed for humans first-and-for-all ; I think consistently making it decide
for humans would likely remove the relative aspect of morality over time,
leaving all your decisions to a "greater entity" and all that entails.

I did enjoy the article, if only as a very interesting thought exercise, but I
sincerely hope not too many people take it to heart.

------
robert_tweed
I have to say this is one of the more thought-provoking ideas to be posted
here in a while. I agree with the cynics that it's probably not a good
solution to the problem of codifying laws. Legalese is already intended to act
like code, but what separates it is the requirement for human interpretation,
especially in applicability to unforeseen circumstances.

For example, how do you codify concepts like, from easy to hard: assault;
theft; copyright infringement; or software patents, in terms of the underlying
social benefits and harms that these concepts are supposed to enshrine? Ideas
about exactly what is "harm" or "benefit" (and their highly subjective nature)
have been well explored in sci-fi. The short story "Liar!" by Isaac Asimov
springs to mind in particular.

On the other hand, I can see these ideas being more immediately useful for
digital contracts. Some have pointed out that software can have bugs, but so
can contracts. Some have pointed out that code isn't as accessible as plain
writing, but contracts already aren't written in plain language. The very
clear advantage of a purely code based contract is that you can query it
without a lawyer. Imagine having a contract that you can literally ask
questions, like "what will happen in the event of Foo?" and get a clear,
unambiguous answer. Contracts today are open to interpretation. If you try to
query a contract, you'll have to pay a lawyer a lot of money and get an answer
like "Most likely this, but it may depend on a judge's opinion".

Another advantage of code is that it can be refactored. This means if you have
a large, complex contract, you can restructure it to produce smaller, simpler
contracts that focus on specific areas that may be of more or less interest to
different parties. This can be done while provably not destroying any
information. That isn't possible if you merely summarise a contract.

------
mannykannot
Putting aside the improbability of the notion that we are about to make a
breakthrough in writing precisely what we mean in code, virtually none of the
difficulties that arise in law and governance are of the sort that can be
resolved by formal logic. The law is primarily about human relationships and
conflict resolution, not rules.

------
soufron
I think this paper is more important for AI than for law. Wolfram correctly
considers that we're bad at giving complex instructions to AI and that the way
Law does it is very good. Thus, getting inspiration from legal systems to code
AI is a great idea - I actually worked a lot on this during my PhD in
2000/2005.

On the contrary, trying to use AI to regulate legal systems is... well
actually we already do it a lot! Smart Contracts? Just look at the way an
invoice is generated today. Taxes? You really think there is a guy putting the
numbers in your tax declaration? Etc.

There will be more AI in Law in the future. But that's about it. It won't
change its nature. It will allow Law to evolve more quickly and to become ever
more precise - creating more and more rules instead of simplifying it.
Contrary to most people, I think that more Law is always better than less. So
I guess it's a good thing.

------
flukus
Why not keep it in english and add some unit tests that demonstrate the intent
of the law?

~~~
erispoe
They are called precedents.

~~~
flukus
I mean in a more TDD approach, precedents are regression tests.

------
jaza
I thought about the similarities between law and computer code several years
back - see [http://greenash.net.au/thoughts/2008/08/legislation-and-
prog...](http://greenash.net.au/thoughts/2008/08/legislation-and-programming-
two-peas-in-a-pod/)

Nice to see that Stephen Wolfram goes into much more depth than I do, about
what would be required for this to happen. He's also more optimistic than I
am!

------
rohankshir
the piece seems too founded on symbolic representation and building a world
model, but the vast amount of AI systems deployed don't use either of those,
or only use a bit of 'knowledge'. His example with 'You should eat a banana'
should be replaced with 'You went banana crazy'. This highlights the ambiguity
that we may want to tell a machine, that any symbolic system would utterly
fail at.

He touched on machine-learning, but I think the most powerful systems in the
future will be heavily built upon data driven algorithms will (and presently)
be able to handle ambiguity and understand what this means.

------
randcraw
SW; DR. But I think SW is partly right. I think AI systems _will_ parse and
assess new legal documents and laws, but not to compile them into code.
Instead the AI-based legal engine will simplify, disambiguate, and debug
informally specified legal documents of all kinds into a form that is
logically consistent and narratively standardized. Every AI-post-processd
document will follow a legal template, simplified. clarified, and systematized
by the bot.

I'm sure it'll be a while yet before AI-processed legalese can make deep use
of common sense or real world knowledge. But I think it should be possible
soon to at least symbolize the concepts specified and confirm that the logical
premises and constraints are well formed, based on a small domain-specific
knowledgebase customized to each use case.

For example: real estate contracts. The terms used in leases should be fairly
few, and the relations between owner, lessor, lessee, et al should be
straightforward enough to allow a bot to build and maintain a sufficient world
model of relations to represent all the necessities to capture any property's
purchase, sale, or lease.

The advantage then is that the AI processor could look for anomalies or
unusual attributes (present or missing) and reveal them to the signatories,
perhaps interactively, as well as rewrite the legalese into a very standard
format that _any_ human could understand quickly, since all terms and
constraints would be presented in the same standard sequence every time.

If such an AI capability then could be extended to handle contracts of other
kinds, I don't see why, one day, all contracts could not be subsumed by the
bot. Plausibly, as the model grows, the bot might scale up to accommodate
other application areas of law and all the other uses for legalese.

Once the models for each application area of law are induced derived and
matured, such an AI bot should be able to create and flesh out any legal
document simply by applying an efficient Q&A with the consumer or lawmaker,
meanwhile offering advice on potential gaps, unintended consequences, and
loopholes. Then the need for encoded legalese like what SW proposes would
disappear as the fundamental tenets of legal verbiage disappear into the
representational workings of the [Deep Net or whatever].

------
ryanlm
I've always wondered, why is the tax code called the "tax code" Is it written
in English and how many lines is it?

~~~
umanwizard
Not sure if you're a native English speaker, but anyway this usage is not
specific to tax. All bodies of law can be called a "code".

For example, the body of federal law in the U.S. is called the "United States
Code". [http://uscode.house.gov/](http://uscode.house.gov/)

~~~
richardfontana
Not all bodies of law would be called a code. "Code" is, I think, always
legislative in nature, and specifically indicates a codified or organized and
self-contained body of law. For a good example of the difference, compare the
United States Statutes at Large with the U.S. Code. I'm not sure if that
distinction carries over into the civil law countries, but I'd think it would
(in order to revise or add to the civil code, you'd have to enact various
statutes).

There's also the "model code" category in the US, where what you're codifying
is typically common law principles distilled from court decisions, subject to
some attempt at reform by the people involved in developing the model code.

------
mentifex
[http://ai.neocities.org/AiLaw.html](http://ai.neocities.org/AiLaw.html) is
complex material.

------
joshmarinacci
Isn't this a Wolfram blog? Why is it here?

