[ben_w]

> simpler laws that are unambiguous and free from exploitation and/or loopholes

Is such a thing possible?

I mean, "simple" often has a lot of exploits and loopholes, while "unambiguous" pretty much means Lojban and similar instead of normal languages like English, Welsh, or Swahili.

[brandall10]

This is a fantastic point and gets at the crux of the issue.

I do see a future where laws are encoded in an unambiguous, conceptual/symbolic form, to be as simple as possible, but virtually unintelligible to read by a human directly, a machine code of sorts.

The point of a 'laywer' AI would be to act as an oracle to interpret the law in the target language at the level of specificity requested by the user. For those writing the law, the AI would interpret the motives and question the user about any ambiguity, potential ethical issues or clashes with other law, to assert conceptual integrity.

[9dev]

That is unacceptable. You’re describing a black box that cannot be examined, understood or held accountable; you’re assuming it’s programming is absolutely objective, which it wouldn’t be even if all responsible parties had the best intentions. That throws us back into times of worshipping an infallible god at the temple. Law, democracy ultimately, must be made by the people for the people, or it becomes a tool in the hands of the rich and powerful agains the majority. This is the same reason elections must be held using paper, so every single citizen can understand and participate in the election process. The second you bring voting machines into the equation, you’ve created a technocracy, leaving the unknowing out and depend on those in control of the machines.

[brandall10]

A fair point, but addressed by having ‘attorney’ models open source/open weights.

[ben_w]

That just replaces a "difficult but humanly possible" task (practicing law) with a "we think this must be possible in principle but all of us working together have only scratched the surface" task (interpretability).

When the average person cannot understand either the law or matrix multiplication, they're definitely not going to be able to understand laws created by matrix multiplication.

(And to the extent that our brains are also representable by a sufficiently large set of matricies, we also don't understand how we ourselves think; I believe we trust each other because we evolved to, but even then we argue that someone is "biased" or "fell for propaganda" or otherwise out-group them, and have to trust to our various and diverse systems of government and education to overcome that).

[9dev]

That doesn’t address anything. It only leads to the generation of a single line of arguments stacked against each other, but does nothing on accountability, observability, and is just as enigmatic and intransparent to laypeople. You’re describing a dystopia of complex technology that only a very small elite will be able to control.

[Mordisquitos]

I don't necessarily agree with the premise that simple language is more open to loopholes. However, even if it were true, common law systems [0], such as those of most of the UK and the US, are arguably intended to deal with ambiguities and the risk of potential exploits and loopholes, by offering judges significant leeway in their interpretation of a given law and establishing precedent. It is the civil law system [1] which is much more sensitive to precise wording.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system)

[daveguy]

Not the OP, but I think the point is that simple language is inherently less precise than complex and legal-specific language.

[rUsHeYaFuBu]

It's certainly a challenge.

Clearly the language spoken today is not entirely the same language spoken a few hundred years ago.

The meaning and intent behind a word written a century or two earlier has the ability to morph and change.

So, that is to say if it's indeed possible to truly make a communication system that is entirely unambiguous and only as complex as is necessary for it to achieve its goal, I do not know.

Even if it is not provably possible however, that should not remove the intent to aim towards that. Especially with regards to legislation or law writing.

I can't recall the source but I think with programming there is an aphorism along the lines that just about every program can be shorter and it is not without bugs. It seems to be something similar is applicable for laws.

Aside, I'll have to look into lojban as I am unfamiliar with it. It looks interesting though.