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by Reflecticon 875 days ago
Lawyer here and even though I know just a little about programming, I also always think that laws, contracts etc are like code running on society. Only when people fight over it and go to court, you run it on a "computer" but we only can test it beforehand running on human imagination. I'm very excited about chatgpt and it's capabilities to finally have a test environment for clauses where we can ask of ambiguity of terms, cases we haven't considered in the law/agreement and contradictions within the document. If we could have an ide for lawyers, that would be great too.
1 comments

Laws are less like program code than they are like declarative constraints. And society has to solve for how to operate within those constraints. That's what makes making good law so difficult; it's like prompt-engineering a model and only getting results back, for good or ill, years or decades later. And when you do make a mistake (which is often) it can take that long to fix it!
Program code can be declarative constraints. As said elsewhere in this thread, Prolog is an example of such a system.