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

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].