Hacker News Reader

Comment by Retra | Hacker News Reader

Your conclusions don't necessarily follow. Your interpretation of that post is exactly the kind of problem being addressed here; your idea of how laws currently work is preventing you from seeing how to change them.

Basically, what you have to do is codify human discretion. If a judge wants to say "no, this really isn't a problem," he should be able to directly add that exception to the written law, and then enforce it as written. It's basically a kind of open source law. The question becomes of how to distribute authority.

View on HN

> he should be able to directly add that exception to the written law, and then enforce it as written. It's basically a kind of open source law. The question becomes of how to distribute authority.

So basically, more or less what happens now, only with more bureaucracy and complexity? I'm sorry, but I don't see the benefit in that case.

The benefit is that you can better automate it.

But if that line of reasoning were good enough, then the US made a mistake by rejecting the rule of a monarch. Democracy is rife with managerial issues.

The typical premise behind automation is to remove the (ethical and financial) burden of a human workforce while keeping the benefits provided by human labor. For most business processes this is acceptable (inevitable loss of jobs notwithstanding.)

But when your 'product' is violence on behalf of the state (in the anarcho-libertarian sense of 'violence' being any non-voluntary interaction with a person or power structure, sometimes involving actual violence) then the ability of humans to mediate, alter and affect that system becomes a feature as well as a bug. This necessarily limits the speed of the law and the degree to which it can be optimized, and remain humane, because removing humans from that system tends to merely concentrate power in the hands of the few humans necessary for it to function.

And then the questions become if humans can write the laws, and humans can update the laws, and humans are enforcing the laws, and have discretion in doing so, then what really is being automated, or optimized, other than recordkeeping? And for that matter, what does law as a programming language actually improve?

>then what really is being automated, or optimized, other than recordkeeping?

Other than record keeping? Why does it need to go beyond that? You don't want transparency in your laws? You don't want the ability to format and translate them as needed? You don't want the ability to do queries and comparisons? You don't want machines to be able to update their own behavior when the law changes?

I'm not talking about automating anything other than record keeping.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com