But I have an impression that "wiggle-room" contracts are not scaleable, when you need to have the same contract with multiple parties with a significant chance of having an "adversary" among them.
(lawyer here, but i don't make a living at it so i have no care :P)
Empirically, they are in fact scalable.
The number of contracts litigated in the situation you are talking, as a percentage of overall contracts in those situations, is ridiculously small.
(choose any metric, in fact, and you'll see they've scaled just fine)
Meanwhile, the thinking you are espousing turns out to be pretty much impossible in practice even if you wanted it to be so. I get the desire by engineers, and even the desire in some forms of contracts. But in the general case, in fact, it makes it much much worse than we have now. In one case, you have a judge looking at the spirit of the contract and making some reasonable decision about what should happen.
In the other, you have to have completed the often impossible task of thinking and codifying every edge case and possibility. If you get it wrong, too bad, so sad.
I know which i'd want.
One of the reasons we have judges in the first place is because the desire to codify all possibilities is not achievable. It's not a thing we sanely have achieved in thousands of years of law, contracts, etc.
The idea that because we are now expressing it in a bytecoded language and not words, it will suddenly become possible to achieve, seems incredibly wrong headed, because the language was never the problem.
The contracts you can effectively express this way were never a problem from the language perspective. It definitely makes them more automatic, but making these contracts more automatic is basically "meh" on the innovation scale[1].
[1] Though i'm not crazy and certainly believe there are many many billions of dollars to be had in doing this.
Human judges verifying the data for outcome seems akin to proof reading. If computers get more advanced, less "proof reading" is needed. It seems like automating lawyer work will make society a more fair place, if you agree with me that more cases being brought up is better than no sue or settlement. Price could also go down this way.
I'm very curious if there'd be a different take on common law and civil law when it comes to AI. There's already an AI called NDA Lynn which checks whether an NDA is "fair" for you or not. Its essentially free if you're OK with your data becoming part of the ML base (if not it costs 45 EUR IIRC). [1] The person who made this is a lawyer and isn't afraid this type of tech will put lawyers out of business.
Reading Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age currently, and it was apparent to me that Bud's hearing was all done by humans, and a judge. It seemed to me that it was just that it was crystal clear that he was guilty that the verdict was cast so quickly? Or did I miss something?
>It definitely makes them more automatic, but making these contracts more automatic is basically "meh" on the innovation scale.
I don't know, sufficient automation allows for millions of contracts a second, all automatically generated, many relying on layers and layers of hundreds of other automated contracts being executed in real-time.
That is, the difference could be as drastic as between computation algorithms for pen-and-paper, and the Internet as we know it now. Will it? No idea, but I think writing contract automation off as 'meh' is as shortsighted as thinking the Internet is basically a faster postal service that can't deliver packages.
But I have an impression that "wiggle-room" contracts are not scaleable, when you need to have the same contract with multiple parties with a significant chance of having an "adversary" among them.