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Comment by bsedlm | Hacker News Reader

I firmly believe that it will be. However it won't be anytime soon because this entails a transition similar to going from rule by king to rule by laws.

The law is (nowdays) is backed by writing, and since I think that computing is a next step in the evolution of writing (along with printing press) one day---likely in dozens of generations (hundreds of years)---the law will be backed by computing.

All these technologies change the nature of a human's consiouness; it will take hundreds of years. Look at Walter Ong's work for better made arguments along these lines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_J._Ong

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You're missing the point that flexibility of interpretation and "execution" is a very much desired feature.

And you're missing the point that these things exist for humans

+1 Law is human-to-human agreement about a lot of vague soft stuff. Code APIs are computer-computer agreement.

Some exceptions to the above are: 1. Financial contracts (see ISDA derivatives). They're written with a big "human" document upfront and then there's a "notification addendum" attached to each use of that contract. 2. Master Sales Agreements (MSAs): The first MSA is a human-to-human agreement. Everything after that is order-forms. And negotiating the MSA requirements is very very human (risk, trust, effort, cost, benefit & promises). Order forms are pricing decisions that can be "automated" (especially around annual renewals if within budget without red flags).

Yeah, the more black-and-white domains tend to be financial and commercial – and in those domains, there have been some pretty cool illustrations: http://complaw.stanford.edu/complaw/readings/sla.pdf

> these things exist for humans

so does law.

As do all laws. You have a point about contracts though, assuming we admit contracts between non-moral parties to actually be a legally enforceable thing. If your would-be law/contract/??? can't get both sides in front of a court, one ought to disregard its terms.

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