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I think some of the general weirdness people feel around AI policing is that there are so many dumb laws on the books, and if we let robots judge, then there is

I think some of the general weirdness people feel around AI policing is that there are so many dumb laws on the books, and if we let robots judge, then there is no mercy. Also, everyone will be in jail because, on average, every American commits a felony every day ( because there are so many weird dumb laws ). I think someone should make AI to refactor law code into 1/1000 its current size. There are like millions of lines of law, even for stuff like soybean farming. I'm sure a lot of that is duplicitous, redundant legal speak, not a precise computer-type language.

pjc50 8y ago
Spoken like someone who's never seen a million lines of business logic in actual code. And it develops for the same reasons: in a complex system there's going to be all sorts of weird corner cases, and some of them are bad, so you write some more code/laws to deal with those outcomes ...
- oceanghost 8y ago
  The phrase for this is "the law of unintended consequences."
- ErikAugust 8y ago
  How does that detract from the point? They are arguing for a sort of "code deletion" and "refactoring" of laws. A far superior way of maintaining a codebase. Not just "ADD MORE LINES OF CODE", which you make sound is like some concrete reality of how things always get done. It's not. And no one should strive to do things this way.
  - TrainedMonkey 8y ago
    Adding more lines of code is something that you can control and do right now. Changing the world so you do not have to do that takes significantly more time and effort. In other words, growing complexity of the system to deal with new cases is past of least resistance.
    - wu-ikkyu 8y ago
      If we always followed that logic we'd still be using first gen OS from the 1970's, or perhaps we'd still be using the Code of Hammurabi. Reevaluating legacy systems in the face of paradigm shift is a crucial part of natural evolution.
  - jamesb93 8y ago
    Except real life isn't as simple as even the largest repos of code. There are edge cases that deal with morality and ethics rather than if and for statements.
- danschumann 8y ago
  There is a certain amount of business logic that can't be refactored away ( -someone's law ), but there is also bloat. Who is refactoring this law code? No one. It gets written once and stands forever. It gets repealed once and a while, but it doesn't get actively refactored.
- makewavesnotwar 8y ago
  Spoken like someone who's never experienced the inanity of the US's criminal justice system. Many of the laws on the books are there due to lobbying, not logic, reason or need. Some are based on moral outrage to propaganda, some are due to businesses wanting greater leverage of their market and greater control over the entry-barrier. Many laws are totally unconstitutional but remain because someone must be successfully challenged which is hard when the law is meant to target the homeless guy you just don't like sitting on your corner who wouldn't have the means to hire a proper attorney. I think what the original poster was getting at is that AI enforcement, with a broken legal system is a recipe for abuse and injustice. The entire idea of selective enforceability is an affront to the concept of justice. I've had my car searched for drugs by police in Arizona without cause other than they thought I "appeared to be on drugs" due to the fact they made me stand outside in the snow for 10 minutes while questioning me during a bogus traffic stop and I eventually started to shiver. I was driving through AZ on my way from Colorado to California... two places recreational marijuana are perfectly legal (by state standards) yet if they would have found even the smallest amount of weed in my car even if someone else had just dropped it somewhere (they check literally everywhere -- including rifling through my tea bags with their dirty paws), I would have been in jail on felony charges. Granted I made sure my car was immaculate because I know how insane the people of AZ are when it comes to "criminal justice" and all it cost me was an hour of travel time. But the fact remains that there is no presumed consistency in law and felonies are a big deal and have consequences that reach far beyond some localized legal affair. I have known people who have picked up felonies because they were doing something innocuous beside being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And when we start talking about AI enforcement, it's a scary concept because a felony means that for instance you could be picked up on federal firearm charges because some program found a slingshot in a picture of your bedroom on Facebook which gave them cause to issue a warrant to raid your house. And then you aren't able to flee the country because you can't just walk down to Mexico like you used to be able to because of the AI surveillance. Taking the high-horse and saying people should trust in the system and just do their duty as citizens is great and all, but that type of ignorance is also why we have the highest prison population in the world. People who could be benefiting society even if only marginally, who are forced to be strictly welfare cases. Not to mention, this isn't solving any problem - just opening the door to a bunch of new potential problems, so what's the point, other than lining the pocket of some random government contractor who probably lobbied for the tech in the first place? This is inane.
- femto 8y ago
  That's why we have judges (and why we should preserve the judiciary rather than undermining it with mandatory sentencing laws): to deal with the corner cases. The law could be kept simple and judges be trusted to deal with the complex corner cases. Having said that, I guess all that happens is statutory law remains simple, but case law grows more complex as the body of judicial decisions grows? What we seem to be missing is a "refactoring" process to periodically rewrite statutory law to replace bloat in case law with a more otimised statute. Like coders, politicians prefer to work on shiny new features than maintaining existing features?
prolepunk 8y ago
Yeah, let's replace judiciary with a 90 degree weld.
xamuel 8y ago
Wasn't it Lincoln who said, "The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly"?
- danschumann 8y ago
  The most talk I've heard for legalization of weed recently was when Sessions was going to enforce it strictly.
aspaceman 8y ago
Are you really arguing that the law should be replaced with a precise computer language? Oh my god HN... Laws are typically written with a lot of vague language because humans operate in vague, gray areas. If you write an entirely prescriptive set of laws (Like Hammurabi's Code of Laws) you will forget some things, be too draconian in others, and overall a sense of justice will be lost.
- danschumann 8y ago
  Not so much that.. but I bet there are logical contradictions in law, and repetition. You know how typescript can check for errors? I bet there are lots of errors in law code. Lets say the same law says something is illegal and not doing something is illegal, because of some convoluted language and whoever passed the law missed it. Maybe not refactor right away, but at least check for errors. Also, if a computer could process law code, lawyers would be obsolete, patent trolls wouldn't have leverage, etc etc.
  - vorpalhex 8y ago
    It's interesting because your view of the law is very optimistic, and you assume law is deterministic. The truth is that fundamentally law is not deterministic. You can't deterministically apply the reasonable person standard, or even the layman standard. How do you handle the expanse of human nature, and it's intricacies and vagaries? Law can't be perfectly deterministic because life is not deterministic given the constraint of free will. Trying to make an idealized code without human judgement (and yes, that exposes human bias as well) results in the worst kind of law - an autocracy.
    - danschumann 8y ago
      Law is logic. Logic can be refactored. I'm betting in 5 years we'll see lawyers use AI to help them do their job, specifically to help them create logical arguments for their cases. What I'm suggesting is computers to take the logic of law code to poke around, tracing logic around and finding the obvious logical inconsistencies. A goal would be reducing law code as well as making it more laymen readable. Obviously a huge benefit of being judged by humans and peers is a sense of mercy. I'm not saying we should mess with that. Also, I would say that anything the computer found would be a suggestion to congress as a way to refactor law, not trusting the computer to automatically do it.
code_duck 8y ago
Laws and punishments were created and tuned expecting that only a small portion of offenses and offenders would be caught, or that punishment could be applied selectively. Punishment of some plays a role as a publicly visible deterrent. That means the punishments are more severe then could be reasonably applied for every infraction of the crime. Crimes that are very common such as speeding or cannabis make good examples of this. If detection and prosecution of those crimes became 100% effective and consistent, courts would be overwhelmed, and the economy would be turned on its head as people go bankrupt paying fines and legal fees or losing their jobs. I assume people would very move quickly to get the speed limits changed to a number that represents the actual maximum speed you can go before receiving a ticket, rather than the vague percentage/luck combo that it is now.
- danschumann 8y ago
  I'm not disagreeing with you, because there is definitely a balance, but I definitely see places where we have have too many laws, which leaves room for tyranny. For example, If there are so many laws that everyone is always doing something illegal all the time, then a corrupt cop can stop anyone he wants to at any time, because they've got to be guilty of something. It's a reason for types of deregulation, and keeping law slim in general.
  - code_duck 8y ago
    I think we're in agreement. Criminalizing common activity gives police discretion for selective enforcement, which leaves the door open for abuse. Contrived example: everyone is speeding, and a corrupt cop only tickets cars with bumper stickers for sports teams that oppose his favorite. It could be a lot worse than that, of course. When police have to overlook a large amount of activity that violates the law, something is wrong with the law.
ggg9990 8y ago
Have you read the laws on soybean farming or are you just making assumptions? Computer programs are small because they have limited forms of input. Because the input to law is the full universe of possible human behavior, law as code would be much larger than it is today, and would require pre-imagining every possible human action, rather than using a phrase like “malicious intent” and letting a judge and jury figure it out.
Pywarrior 8y ago
Your suggestion is farcical, both in the suggested method and size metric. Short laws would only lead to a greater degree of interpretation from fallible humans to reach a disposition.
TooBrokeToBeg 8y ago
The idea of "to add 1 law, remove 2 others" worked well in other locales. The problem of laws being so freeform (sometimes being broad or multi-laws in one) is part of the problem. Forcing succinctness is just stage one of cleaning it up.
- eric_h 8y ago
  > The idea of "to add 1 law, remove 2 others" worked well in other locales I've heard this hypothesized as a means to remove legislative bloat, but where has it actually been implemented?
  - danschumann 8y ago
    In the USA it's being done, but not for sole purpose of refactoring/simplification. started as 2:1 https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/01/trumps-regulation-eo/515007/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/01/trumps-... 6 months in, it was actually more like 16:1 https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/trump-kills-16-regulations-for-every-new-one-crushing-2-for-1-goal https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/trump-kills-16-regulation... I think I heard recently it's more like 24:1.
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      Burning down a house does not count as a remodeling.
      - eric_h 8y ago
        It can if you rebuild it afterwards, but obviously that is not the intent of the current administration.
kevin_b_er 8y ago
Also once the AI decides you committed a crime, you are denied the right to vote to voice a desire to change those unfair laws.
musage 8y ago
> I think someone should make AI to refactor law code into 1/1000 its current size That someone should "make AI to do X" certainly isn't too much to ask. Likewise, why can't just someone make a pill that gives us perfect memory and understanding of all laws on the books? Make the pill so you only have to swallow it once, and then your knowledge gets automatically updated. Make a pill that does all that, but is also very easy to make and has no side-effects, so there are no big costs or complications. Such a complex problem, and yet we both proposed very elegant solutions within minutes of thinking about it. Why isn't this this sorted already?
chottocharaii 8y ago
You should reconsider your mental model of the law. With respect, it’s misinformed. Law in its writing and interpretation is less deterministic, and quantity of statute is far less of a factor in its complexity than most in STEM realise. Further, to parse law in a sense that it could be sensibly refactored, would be impossible with AI/ML as the field stands today, and I think will never be possible.

pjc50 8y ago

Spoken like someone who's never seen a million lines of business logic in actual code. And it develops for the same reasons: in a complex system there's going to be all sorts of weird corner cases, and some of them are bad, so you write some more code/laws to deal with those outcomes ...

oceanghost 8y ago
The phrase for this is "the law of unintended consequences."
ErikAugust 8y ago
How does that detract from the point? They are arguing for a sort of "code deletion" and "refactoring" of laws. A far superior way of maintaining a codebase. Not just "ADD MORE LINES OF CODE", which you make sound is like some concrete reality of how things always get done. It's not. And no one should strive to do things this way.
- TrainedMonkey 8y ago
  Adding more lines of code is something that you can control and do right now. Changing the world so you do not have to do that takes significantly more time and effort. In other words, growing complexity of the system to deal with new cases is past of least resistance.
  - wu-ikkyu 8y ago
    If we always followed that logic we'd still be using first gen OS from the 1970's, or perhaps we'd still be using the Code of Hammurabi. Reevaluating legacy systems in the face of paradigm shift is a crucial part of natural evolution.
- jamesb93 8y ago
  Except real life isn't as simple as even the largest repos of code. There are edge cases that deal with morality and ethics rather than if and for statements.
danschumann 8y ago
There is a certain amount of business logic that can't be refactored away ( -someone's law ), but there is also bloat. Who is refactoring this law code? No one. It gets written once and stands forever. It gets repealed once and a while, but it doesn't get actively refactored.
makewavesnotwar 8y ago
Spoken like someone who's never experienced the inanity of the US's criminal justice system. Many of the laws on the books are there due to lobbying, not logic, reason or need. Some are based on moral outrage to propaganda, some are due to businesses wanting greater leverage of their market and greater control over the entry-barrier. Many laws are totally unconstitutional but remain because someone must be successfully challenged which is hard when the law is meant to target the homeless guy you just don't like sitting on your corner who wouldn't have the means to hire a proper attorney. I think what the original poster was getting at is that AI enforcement, with a broken legal system is a recipe for abuse and injustice. The entire idea of selective enforceability is an affront to the concept of justice. I've had my car searched for drugs by police in Arizona without cause other than they thought I "appeared to be on drugs" due to the fact they made me stand outside in the snow for 10 minutes while questioning me during a bogus traffic stop and I eventually started to shiver. I was driving through AZ on my way from Colorado to California... two places recreational marijuana are perfectly legal (by state standards) yet if they would have found even the smallest amount of weed in my car even if someone else had just dropped it somewhere (they check literally everywhere -- including rifling through my tea bags with their dirty paws), I would have been in jail on felony charges. Granted I made sure my car was immaculate because I know how insane the people of AZ are when it comes to "criminal justice" and all it cost me was an hour of travel time. But the fact remains that there is no presumed consistency in law and felonies are a big deal and have consequences that reach far beyond some localized legal affair. I have known people who have picked up felonies because they were doing something innocuous beside being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And when we start talking about AI enforcement, it's a scary concept because a felony means that for instance you could be picked up on federal firearm charges because some program found a slingshot in a picture of your bedroom on Facebook which gave them cause to issue a warrant to raid your house. And then you aren't able to flee the country because you can't just walk down to Mexico like you used to be able to because of the AI surveillance. Taking the high-horse and saying people should trust in the system and just do their duty as citizens is great and all, but that type of ignorance is also why we have the highest prison population in the world. People who could be benefiting society even if only marginally, who are forced to be strictly welfare cases. Not to mention, this isn't solving any problem - just opening the door to a bunch of new potential problems, so what's the point, other than lining the pocket of some random government contractor who probably lobbied for the tech in the first place? This is inane.
femto 8y ago
That's why we have judges (and why we should preserve the judiciary rather than undermining it with mandatory sentencing laws): to deal with the corner cases. The law could be kept simple and judges be trusted to deal with the complex corner cases. Having said that, I guess all that happens is statutory law remains simple, but case law grows more complex as the body of judicial decisions grows? What we seem to be missing is a "refactoring" process to periodically rewrite statutory law to replace bloat in case law with a more otimised statute. Like coders, politicians prefer to work on shiny new features than maintaining existing features?

prolepunk 8y ago

Yeah, let's replace judiciary with a 90 degree weld.

xamuel 8y ago

Wasn't it Lincoln who said, "The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly"?

danschumann 8y ago
The most talk I've heard for legalization of weed recently was when Sessions was going to enforce it strictly.

aspaceman 8y ago

Are you really arguing that the law should be replaced with a precise computer language? Oh my god HN... Laws are typically written with a lot of vague language because humans operate in vague, gray areas. If you write an entirely prescriptive set of laws (Like Hammurabi's Code of Laws) you will forget some things, be too draconian in others, and overall a sense of justice will be lost.

danschumann 8y ago
Not so much that.. but I bet there are logical contradictions in law, and repetition. You know how typescript can check for errors? I bet there are lots of errors in law code. Lets say the same law says something is illegal and not doing something is illegal, because of some convoluted language and whoever passed the law missed it. Maybe not refactor right away, but at least check for errors. Also, if a computer could process law code, lawyers would be obsolete, patent trolls wouldn't have leverage, etc etc.
- vorpalhex 8y ago
  It's interesting because your view of the law is very optimistic, and you assume law is deterministic. The truth is that fundamentally law is not deterministic. You can't deterministically apply the reasonable person standard, or even the layman standard. How do you handle the expanse of human nature, and it's intricacies and vagaries? Law can't be perfectly deterministic because life is not deterministic given the constraint of free will. Trying to make an idealized code without human judgement (and yes, that exposes human bias as well) results in the worst kind of law - an autocracy.
  - danschumann 8y ago
    Law is logic. Logic can be refactored. I'm betting in 5 years we'll see lawyers use AI to help them do their job, specifically to help them create logical arguments for their cases. What I'm suggesting is computers to take the logic of law code to poke around, tracing logic around and finding the obvious logical inconsistencies. A goal would be reducing law code as well as making it more laymen readable. Obviously a huge benefit of being judged by humans and peers is a sense of mercy. I'm not saying we should mess with that. Also, I would say that anything the computer found would be a suggestion to congress as a way to refactor law, not trusting the computer to automatically do it.

code_duck 8y ago

Laws and punishments were created and tuned expecting that only a small portion of offenses and offenders would be caught, or that punishment could be applied selectively. Punishment of some plays a role as a publicly visible deterrent. That means the punishments are more severe then could be reasonably applied for every infraction of the crime. Crimes that are very common such as speeding or cannabis make good examples of this. If detection and prosecution of those crimes became 100% effective and consistent, courts would be overwhelmed, and the economy would be turned on its head as people go bankrupt paying fines and legal fees or losing their jobs. I assume people would very move quickly to get the speed limits changed to a number that represents the actual maximum speed you can go before receiving a ticket, rather than the vague percentage/luck combo that it is now.

danschumann 8y ago
I'm not disagreeing with you, because there is definitely a balance, but I definitely see places where we have have too many laws, which leaves room for tyranny. For example, If there are so many laws that everyone is always doing something illegal all the time, then a corrupt cop can stop anyone he wants to at any time, because they've got to be guilty of something. It's a reason for types of deregulation, and keeping law slim in general.
- code_duck 8y ago
  I think we're in agreement. Criminalizing common activity gives police discretion for selective enforcement, which leaves the door open for abuse. Contrived example: everyone is speeding, and a corrupt cop only tickets cars with bumper stickers for sports teams that oppose his favorite. It could be a lot worse than that, of course. When police have to overlook a large amount of activity that violates the law, something is wrong with the law.

ggg9990 8y ago

Have you read the laws on soybean farming or are you just making assumptions? Computer programs are small because they have limited forms of input. Because the input to law is the full universe of possible human behavior, law as code would be much larger than it is today, and would require pre-imagining every possible human action, rather than using a phrase like “malicious intent” and letting a judge and jury figure it out.

Pywarrior 8y ago

Your suggestion is farcical, both in the suggested method and size metric. Short laws would only lead to a greater degree of interpretation from fallible humans to reach a disposition.

TooBrokeToBeg 8y ago

The idea of "to add 1 law, remove 2 others" worked well in other locales. The problem of laws being so freeform (sometimes being broad or multi-laws in one) is part of the problem. Forcing succinctness is just stage one of cleaning it up.

eric_h 8y ago
> The idea of "to add 1 law, remove 2 others" worked well in other locales I've heard this hypothesized as a means to remove legislative bloat, but where has it actually been implemented?
- danschumann 8y ago
  In the USA it's being done, but not for sole purpose of refactoring/simplification. started as 2:1 https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/01/trumps-regulation-eo/515007/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/01/trumps-... 6 months in, it was actually more like 16:1 https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/trump-kills-16-regulations-for-every-new-one-crushing-2-for-1-goal https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/trump-kills-16-regulation... I think I heard recently it's more like 24:1.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    Burning down a house does not count as a remodeling.
    - eric_h 8y ago
      It can if you rebuild it afterwards, but obviously that is not the intent of the current administration.

kevin_b_er 8y ago

Also once the AI decides you committed a crime, you are denied the right to vote to voice a desire to change those unfair laws.

musage 8y ago

> I think someone should make AI to refactor law code into 1/1000 its current size That someone should "make AI to do X" certainly isn't too much to ask. Likewise, why can't just someone make a pill that gives us perfect memory and understanding of all laws on the books? Make the pill so you only have to swallow it once, and then your knowledge gets automatically updated. Make a pill that does all that, but is also very easy to make and has no side-effects, so there are no big costs or complications. Such a complex problem, and yet we both proposed very elegant solutions within minutes of thinking about it. Why isn't this this sorted already?

chottocharaii 8y ago

You should reconsider your mental model of the law. With respect, it’s misinformed. Law in its writing and interpretation is less deterministic, and quantity of statute is far less of a factor in its complexity than most in STEM realise. Further, to parse law in a sense that it could be sensibly refactored, would be impossible with AI/ML as the field stands today, and I think will never be possible.