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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

I like to turn this argument around to see how absurd it is.

Why not just take the existing law, and have a machine execute it in the style of a computer program?

We wouldn’t need judges juries or lawyers. You’d just type the specifics of your case and any supporting documents/evidence into the computer and a verdict would pop out.

Of course, the system could be used for other stuff too, like checking building code compliance or engineering soundness, signing off on military and police action, setting the executive branch’s priorities, and so on.

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Not a lawyer. My thinking is very likely naive as I have no experience in this matter.

I see two potential issues:

- Picking evidences. "Evaluating" the law might need access to all the possible evidences that could exist, but that would certainly never be true, so you'd need someone to know which evidences to present. You probably cannot rely on some interactive process asking you such and such evidences because it would be presenting evidence that would trigger evaluations of chunks of laws. I would guess a lawyer with good knowledge of the law would probably be needed for this.

- Setting precedents. Wouldn't the "automated" law evaluation run into unprecedented cases all the time? You'd need someone to constantly issue a verdict on unforeseen situations all the time, and I guess you'd need a judge for this.

Maybe it could work on many "trivial" cases though.

Some people have argued that the fuzziness of the legal system can be a good feature for some reason, but you could always have a machine execute the law and a human make the final call. So you wouldn't need judges, juries, or lawyers, but you would need a team of legal shamans that sign off on verdicts

The problem isn’t checking the computer’s output.

It is that the law would need to encode all the stuff I said, so it would need to be nuanced enough to replace all engineering, leadership and administration roles. (And also anything involving ethics.)

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