alt Hacker NewsNilay Patel argues that law is undeterministic (and its application ambiguous) to begin with:
> But law isn’t actually code, and society and courts aren’t computers. [...] the law is not deterministic. You simply cannot take the facts of a case, the law as written, and predict the outcome of that case with any real certainty, even though the formality of the legal system makes people think it works like a computer — that it’s predictable.
> [...] it’s actually ambiguity that’s at the very heart of our legal system. It’s ambiguity that makes lawyers lawyers. Honestly, it’s ambiguity that makes people hate lawyers because it’s always possible to argue the other side, and it’s always possible to find the gray area in the law. That’s why prosecutors end up working as defense attorneys and why our regulators tend to end up working for big corporations.
https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-ba...
IMO, as with most domains, AI _tools_ will save a huge amount of time, but it's the human specialist making judgment calls based on real world context.
Replies
> Nilay Patel argues that law is undeterministic (and its application ambiguous)
I argue that of all things, law should be as deterministic as possible.
I've always thought that we (as a country) should maintain one single ordered list of specific crimes and punishments. Every new case that wants to set a punishment must insert it into this ordered list and explain convincingly why it fits into the list at the proposed position.
This would prevent the outrageous differences we see today where someone gets a few days of house arrest for murder and another guy gets a decade of solitary confinment for stealing a pen.
This isn't really true though. This is how the law used to work, until people did the research and discovered it let to absolutely loads of mad variation in outcomes, with people with similar offences getting totally different sentences based on random luck. Hence most countries not have pretty strict sentencing guidelines, with a bit of space for judgement on top (despite a lot of protesting from judges).
https://www.ubs.com/global/en/our-firm/what-we-do/our-brand/...
You should be able to predict the outcome of a court case if you have all the facts available. That's what fairness means.
Counter argument - even stone age Chat GPT 3 was great at making reasonably convincing sounding arguments and newer models are great at aligning those arguments to souces (laws or cases). Chat is IMO better at ambiguous nonsense than objective analysis.
You can apply this same argument to everything. Code is deterministic but what is being made is often not because people don't know what they want to make. Society can choose just to make everything boring and deterministic so that computers can do everything.