Comment by OkayPhysicist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by OkayPhysicist | Hacker News Reader

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Laws are not algorithms, because a human legal system has wiggle room. You can negotiate, persuade, and the system is capable of dealing with unanticipated input. An algorithm is a strict series of steps, executed based on pre-determined allowable inputs. They are preferable to the ones defining them because A) they can be automated and B) they deflect blame: "It's not my fault, it's just policy" or "it's just the way the program works". They thus act as a proxy for the ruling class to operate through.

"Values" are ideas that we, as a society, "value". Compassion, understanding, etc. These tend to involve nuance, which a system designed in advance and applied blindly to a given circumstance inherently lacks.

Thus, in case you aren't simply feigning ignorance, the title could be expanded to: "When individuals with existing power over others design rigid systems to be applied indiscriminately to those beneath them for both convenience and to redirect the perception of responsibility, it leads to inhumane consequences."

I would push further because the difference is essential and massive. Human legal systems do not have 'wiggle room'. They are living, breathing bodies open to interpretation and change. In fact, radical change and radical interpretation.

There are times where laws have been strict (think of the US three strikes rule, or a US 90s favorite, the singaporean caning rule for littering) however the more rigid the set of rules the more authoritarian a system is assumed to be and generally authoritarianism is assumed to not be favorable.

Alternately, the rule of law means equality in the eyes of the law. Each and every person should be subject to the same rules, despite the variation in interpretation making for a variety of outcomes.

Algorithms lack this and we're seeing the consequences in everything from mundane customer service interactions to the chinese social credit system

The "wiggle room" built into the lega system is because reasoning of any sort is always carried out under conditions of epistemic uncertainty. This is built into legal systems through concepts such as burden of proof, reasonable doubt etc. that acknowledge that the legal system makes mistakes frequently due to a lack of, or distorted information, and therefore there should always be avenues through which decisions can be challenged.

The second concept that is embedded (at least theoretically) in legal systems is the concept of procedural justice, that an outcome is Just iff all participants in the procedure that led to that outcome consider it Just. The most obvious example of this is trial by a jury of your peers.

In light of this you can see two obvious problems with these types of algorithmic systems. First they tend to treat the model as perfect and are used as if they can spit out guilty / not guilty answers by the people using them, and second they are often black boxes where it is impossible for the subject to challenge the outcome, as they don't know how it has been reached.

Ultimately I think these systems need to have a human in the loop and to be reasonable (in the sense that they can be reasoned about)

> Laws are not algorithms, because a human legal system has wiggle room.

Is this "wiggle room" the fundamental difference between laws and algorithms, so fundamental that we have to fear values withering when algorithms rule, but not when laws rule?

Is it the reason the ruling class can't operate through laws, only through algorithms? Does it prevent humans executing policies from saying that "it's not my fault, it's just policy"?

> Is this "wiggle room" the fundamental difference between laws and algorithms, so fundamental that we have to fear values withering when algorithms rule, but not when laws rule?

It's more that human values have never been formalized before. It's not clear they can be formalized in a succinct form. This is actually the core problem of AI safety: if (when) we build a human-level-smart general AI, it will have some set of values, but unless those values are perfectly in line with ours, this exercise will most likely turn lethal to humanity.

Or, conversely, it seems that fully specifying what human values are is equivalent to building an aligned, human-level general AI.

Thus, the fundamental difference between laws and algorithms is that laws are executed by humans. The shared value system is implicitly embedded in the system. Even the best algorithms we can come up with today can't replicate that, which means treating their output as binding will result in judgements we'd generally consider immoral, unjust and wrong.

> this "wiggle room" the fundamental difference between laws and algorithms, so fundamental that we have to fear values withering when algorithms rule, but not when laws rule?

Yes. No rule is clairvoyant. All exceptions cannot be anticipated; exceptions have to be adapted to or stomped out. The law aims to do the former. Algorithms deliver the latter.

> the ruling class can't operate through laws, only through algorithms

Dictators’ decrees are closer to algorithms than law. They’re absolute in a way laws are not. To the degree they diverge, it’s in the enforcement, which is a sloppier version of the law.

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