Article: Computational Law, Symbolic Discourse and the AI Constitution

Computational Law, Symbolic Discourse and the AI Constitution by Stephen Wolfram

Here’s the introduction, if you feel like a long read on the subject this is the piece for you

October 12, 2016

Leibniz’s Dream

Gottfried Leibniz—who died 300 years ago this November—worked on many things. But a theme that recurred throughout his life was the goal of turning human law into an exercise in computation. Of course, as we know, he didn’t succeed. But three centuries later, I think we’re finally ready to give it a serious try again. And I think it’s a really important thing to do—not just because it’ll enable all sorts of new societal opportunities and structures, but because I think it’s likely to be critical to the future of our civilization in its interaction with artificial intelligence.

Human law, almost by definition, dates from the very beginning of civilization—and undoubtedly it’s the first system of rules that humans ever systematically defined. Presumably it was a model for the axiomatic structure of mathematics as defined by the likes of Euclid. And when science came along, “natural laws” (as their name suggests) were at first viewed as conceptually similar to human laws, except that they were supposed to define constraints for the universe (or God) rather than for humans.

Full article at http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/10/computational-law-symbolic-discourse-and-the-ai-constitution/