| "What’s fascinating to me is that as recently as a year ago, virtually nobody was talking about this risk. It wasn’t on anybody’s radar." Like-minded people like Carl Malamud have worried about this in the context of legal knowledge for over a decade. When there is a monopoly (duopoly of West/Lexis(Thompson Reuters) on the "official" publication of statutes, regulations, codes, and other aspects of government, what protections are there that they won't introduce inaccuracies of their own? What was really scary was that in order to contract for a new copy of say, a certain state's set of statutes, you used to (maybe you still do, I don't know) have to agree to either send back to the company or destroy your old copies. You couldn't be allowed to compare the version from the past if you thought "well this is weird, I always thought murder was illegal but this version says murder is legal." You don't know if that's a typo in this one version, a cosmic ray bitflip, or something more nefarious (and murder would probably be the least conspicious law to get that accomplished). What if something that used to be punishable by a $10,000 or prison has a new version that suddenly states $100,000 or prison. We have to have a way that preserves all old legal knowledge and all new legal knowledge - it will never be safe to just go all on digital infrastructure in this regard. There are so many times as a lawyer I want to see the oldest existing paper copy. And now I have to worry about AI hallucinating an authentic-looking paper copy... |