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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

I agree. Similar thing applies to laws in general; I usually compare this "wiggle room" to grease in the gearbox. Without it, the gears of justice will stop turning, or even break down completely.

Putting perfect laws as code is essentially a humanlike-AI-complete problem. That is, the necessary code would also have to implicitly and completely implement our intuitions about morality, and the mechanisms behind emotions and suffering. We can't do that, so we need some wiggle room, to enable humans to be humane.

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A good example of this concept in action is actually the whole Ethereum / DAO fiasco, where the contract code actually contained a bug. Turns out the bug was not intended to be “binding”, and thus the Ethereum chain was forked to undo any damage of the bug.

So seems like even the crypto / smart contract community agrees with this sentiment to some degree, although forking an entire block chain might be somewhat of a crude interpretation of “wiggle room”.

The way I understand it, the people behind Ethereum had significant skin in the game, in the form of lots of money/assets that got stolen, and that might have tainted their opinion about what to do

I recall that a second large theft [1] did not get a hard-fork resolution.

Whether it's due to bias from the core team or a wish to stay away from being a final arbitration after the first event, I'm not in a position to judge.

[1] https://www.coindesk.com/30-million-ether-reported-stolen-pa...

After reading the book Ordinary Injustice, I can assure you the US legal system is extremely far from humane. Our system is overworked, biased, and inherently breaking down in th invisible small courts of our country. Fairly enforced laws may seem inhumane, and I am sure there would need to be patches to any such system to refine the morality it reflects, but I am having a hard time imagining it being any less humane. Secondarily, you can simply issue a "fix" contract for 25 million extra. If the other business is operating in good faith, which they obviously were they would be just as willing to have an additional contract to make it right. I am not sure I am a fan of smart contracts or not yet. There can still also be overrides for humanitarian purposes.

I am skeptical that we can get well defined laws such that algorithmic enforcement is feasible before say mathematical proofs of computer software is widespread. If we can't/don't practically do the latter, I'm not sure how we expect the former to become possible in a general sense.

On the other hand, maybe there is a useful narrow subset of contracts/contract law that is possible to implement. Aren't there some contract areas which are written with fairly extensive references to some set of uniform agreements?

That seems to imply we need two pieces of code for "perfect laws as code": 1) that which writes/defines the laws and 2) that which interprets the prevailing milieu and determines the application of law.

Since we're speculating anyways, why not implement the whole system we currently have? Assuming humanlike-AI (heh!), the following services are imaginable:

    1 AI Legislature
    2 AI Judge
    3 AI Lawyers

Govt programmers handle (1) and (2), applicants and respondents (or prosecution and defence) handle (3). AI Legislature determines laws according to citizen referendum and policy upon consultation with the the AI Judges. Each AI Lawyer makes arguments to the AI Judge who evaluates each against the law and jurisprudence to arrive at a judgement. Wiggle away!

As a final layer which arose out of the Luddite massacres of 2137-40, a group of rubber-stamping human judges at the top serving as final adjudicators and appellate court.

Playing devil's advocate, allowing for 'wiggle-room' in laws encourages vague/hand-wavey/overly broad laws. Because the devil is always in the detail.

This allows for two key issues to manifest:

1) Selective enforcement 2) A non-expert can't know whether they are breaking any laws in advance of action

In the US, the vagueness doctrine prevents most of that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagueness_doctrine

> 1) Selective enforcement

That's a problem, yes, but it seems a direct flip side of being able to show leniency, or rescue someone from bugs in the legal system. Not sure if we can have one without the other, so there's probably a balance to strike there.

> 2) A non-expert can't know whether they are breaking any laws in advance of action

That's true in current legal system, though I don't think it's a flip side the way selective enforcement is. In a system closer to ideal, you should be able to always know when you're breaking a law in advance; it's just that the system should have an ability to not enforce it in special circumstances.

> Putting perfect laws as code is essentially a humanlike-AI-complete problem. That is, the necessary code would also have to implicitly and completely implement our intuitions about morality, and the mechanisms behind emotions and suffering.

I don't think this applies to all areas of law. Take tax law, for instance. Is there any moral or ethical or otherwise well-founded argument in favour of having tax laws interpreted less strictly than a machine would?

Not sure how deep you're intending to go on "tax law", but from my cursory knowledge I'd wonder if in judging eligibility for tax deductions related to disadvantaged status in society, or disability, we might be influenced by our moral compass, though I know not enough to validate if this wiggle room exists or not. I suppose the question further up is if it should exist, which is another matter entirely.

Yes - presuppose you fall seriously ill right before a filing deadline. The IRS actually covers such cases under a one time abatement policy.

I could see it - a willful and deliberate disregard for the law can be treated differently to a simple mistake.

To my knowledge, even in existing legal systems financial laws are given much more leeway than other areas of the law. This is generally due to the well-founded belief that people working in the financial industry are going to find loopholes, and therefore many tax laws are non-specific. Compare to how some internet forums have rules along the lines of "don't be a jerk".

I am under the impression that Canada, for instance, has a law that basically says "if you do something just for the tax benefit we reserve the right to call you out".

IIRC, Liberace was once involved in a tax case where the question was if his on-stage costumes were "clothes" or a business expense.

Ethical questions can take weird forms.

There have been multiple tax tribunal cases in the UK over what constitutes a cake or a biscuit. We have seen multiple cases over the distinction between an employee and a self-employed contractor. Even if you have an ultra-minimalist flat tax code, you're still going to have disputes over what constitutes earned income and what is or isn't a legitimate business expense. Tax is hard.

https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/vat-food/vfood6260

The US Supreme Court ruled that tomatoes are legally considered vegetables for tax purposes, even though scientifically they're classified as fruits.

And the funny thing is, this sounds entirely reasonable. As they say, knowledge is knowing that tomatoes are fruits; wisdom is knowing that you should not put them in a fruit salad.

> scientifically they're classified as fruits

Honestly this is just blatant sophistry, given that other 'fruits' include blueberries, pumpkins, cucumbers, avocados, peanuts, lima beans, raspberries, and arguably pinecones.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit#Table_of_fruit_examples et al

Well, are Pringles "potato chips" ("crisps")? The legal answer has changed over time and there are taxes to be paid in one case that's not paid in the other.

http://www.taxgirl.com/pringles-successfully-argues-that-the...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7490346.stm

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2009/ma...

Jaffa Cakes, Budweiser, and other products have had similar cases in different places as to what they are or are not. They impact taxes, product labels, advertising, and more.

At one time there were customers who couldn't get budget room for a computer, so Digital Equipment Corporation sold them the Programmable Digital Processor because automated processing was fine. They made 14 minicomputers in the PDP line, and the PDP-11 was manufactured until 1996, just two years before the acquisition by Compaq. While this probably didn't save them or their customers taxes anywhere, it did help their customers the wiggle room to actually be customers in the 1960s. https://digital.com/about/dec/

Never underestimate the value of a good technicality or shrug off a negative one. They can be make-or-break details.

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