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> While laws and contract terms are written in natural language, this is an AI-complete problem. Beautiful way of putting it. I want to take it one step furth

> While laws and contract terms are written in natural language, this is an AI-complete problem. Beautiful way of putting it. I want to take it one step further, however: While laws and contracts are written for human consumption this will be a problem. In the same way that DRM is always going to have to allow for users to view video with analog eyeballs and hear sound with analog ears, if laws and contracts are to be sensible to humans, they must be written in something a lot like normal language. I always argue that legalese is something more than normal language, but the point is that even in this stance, the interpreter is still a human being with semantic judgment faculties, and not a compiler or run-time interpreter. You know why I do not anticipate that this will ever come to pass? The people in power that write laws and enforce contracts are human beings.

_rpd 10y ago
Yes, even if a legal subsystem is instantiated in which parties agree to abide by "programmatic contracts," the vast majority of people will not willingly use it. When an extremely precise condition is set, some party will eventually attempt to game the system (obeying the letter, but not spirit). It is in the interests of most parties to have some contract terms be ambiguous exactly as anti-gaming hedges. Ethereum's DAO debacle is a great example. It wasn't a hacker exploiting a bug, it was the system working exactly as intended. As soon as you are in a situation where one of the parties protests that "strict compliance with the terms is not enough, common sense must apply" your situation is AI-complete.