[amptorn]

Yes, you do always need humans to enforce/interpret the laws. Don't be absurd.

The alternative is kind of like that scene in Robocop, except ED-209 is a judge instead of a robot, it sentences you to death rather than killing you directly (the bailiff obeys unquestioningly), and instead of frantically trying to shut the machine down, everybody in the room agrees that you were indeed carrying the gun, and almost certainly still are.

You ask for a retrial and it takes 1/50th of a second to spit out exactly the same response. The rationale for the verdict is a procedurally generated AST running to 5200 pages, which is incoherent not only to you but also to lawyers and programmers alike. (You are given a copy of it on a USB stick, but no computer to read it with.)

A country where laws are applied with absolutely no nuance, context, consideration, empathy or judgement is a petrifying hellscape. A pretty good Black Mirror episode, in fact.

E: this is all ignoring how awful human beings are at software development.

[brianclements]

I grant you the absurdity of enforcing all laws with machines/computers/robots. I don't think I was as clear as intended. But I do feel that there are plenty of processes and certain law domains that are equally absurd when you make humans enforce them. These would be things like financial regulation, taxes, immigration maybe? Domains where our nuance, context, and consideration (read: bias) can actually prevent and corrupt the enforcement of these laws. Now granted, this depends on the availability of data infrastructure among other things, but if I could clarify the question, I'm thinking about what lessons learned and processes from software development can bring about efficiencies in government that we haven't considered yet. Not some type of absolute computer takeover of government.