Code is law

October 31st, 2024

Money Stuff recently link to this article about incorrectly granted divorces. Basically the computer system was “off by a day” and a bunch of divorces are in legal-limbo. It raises the point: when software eats the world, broken code means broken laws.

It’s unclear how digital the US government will get, but certainly governments in Singapore or China are getting very digital. And it’s kind of necessary: modern societies and economies are full of complicated interconnections that must be at least mediated and perhaps regulated. Governments have to step into that role. Rulings will be increasingly automated, starting small with divorce processes and running red lights, but likely ending up with civil rulings like property tax valuation or no-fly lists. Who’s at fault when a mistake happens?

In all this, you wonder what role LLMs will play in translating laws to code. Will LLMs let legislators write natural language that’s translated to code? But scammers use LLMs to find edge cases and holes in those same laws? Surely the natural language laws will be “more real” than the code, but then when the code makes a mistake, are those mistakes grandfathered in or are they backfilled as illegal?