Hacker News Reader

The primary concern being that laws are by no means ethical. The easiest example is slavery in the US Constitution.

Also, even if every law was made in accordance with some perfect ethical system (whatever that would be), problems remain:

1. You can still do unethical things that are too small or too big for laws to handle. It's perfectly legal to cheat on your partner, or to mock a bullied child, or to form a political party that takes power and repeals laws you don't like.

2. Even for the things that are covered by laws, a superhuman AI would be able to find bizarre loopholes that obey the letter of the law but would be considered unethical by most people.

Well in a sense, we are already in this situation with companies. Companies always seek out the limits of the law, without much attention to what is ethical. But somehow, in the end, we seem to be able to control them (from a democratic perspective).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com