What does this mean?
What does this mean?
When I say code is law, I mean “law” in the physics sense. We can code, print “hello world”, and know exactly what the code will do. We can write code up to some threshold of complexity and know exactly what it will do in all cases. Like how given certain information about a physical system we can calculate trajectories or whatnot up to some threshold of complexity.
I was making the point that civil law is a different kind of law from this physics sense of the word.
With more clarity, code is physics law, but civil law is not physics law, i.e. civil law cannot be fully ported to computer code.
Maybe I'm wrong and all civil law could be translated to computer code. Might that make for a better world? Even if possible, there's so much inertia in the system with lawyers and judges wanting to keep their job which is another human complexity that would have to be worked through.
But smart contracts would change the way contracts are written, as they're often intentionally ambiguous for a variety of reasons. There's also the problem of "oracles", but we already have a profession for translating real-world events into legal ones (notaries).