The big caveat, though, is that when enforcement becomes more accurate, the rules and penalties need to change. As you point out, a rigidly enforced law is very different from one that is less rigorously enforced. You are right that there is very little recognition of this. The law is difficult to change by design, but it may soon have to change faster than it has in the past, and it's not clear how or if that can happen. Historically, it seems like the only way rapid governmental change happens is by violent revolution, and I would rather not live in a time of violent revolution...

But if I've learned anything in 20 years of software eng, it's that migration plans matter. The perfect system is irrelevant if you can't figure out how to transition to it. AI is dangling a beautiful future in front of us, but the transition looks... Very challenging

Many governments around the world have entities to which you can write a letter, and those entities are frequently obligated to respond to that letter within a specific time frame. Those laws have been written with the understanding that most people don't know how to write letters, and those who do, will not write them unless absolutely necessary.

This allows the regulators to be slow and operate by shuffling around inefficient paper forms, instead of keeping things in an efficient ticket tracking system.

LLMs make it much, much easier to write letters, even if you don't speak the language and can only communicate at the level of a sixth-grader. Imagine what happens when the worst kind of "can I talk to your supervisor" Karen gets access to a sycophantic LLM, which tells her that she's "absolutely right, this is absolutely unacceptable behavior, I will help you write a letter to your regulator, who should help you out in this situation."

https://yalelawjournal.org/pdf/200_ay258cck.pdf

which, as I recall it, suggested that the copyright law effectively considered that it was good that there was a way around copyright (with reverse engineering and clean-room implementation), and also good that the way around copyright required some investment in its own right, rather than being free, easy, and automatic.

I think Samuelson and Scotchmer thought that, as you say, costs matter, and that the legal system was recognizing this, but in a kind of indirect way, not overtly.

Hey, I really like this framing. This is a topic that I've thought about from a different perspective.

We have all kinds of 18th and 19th century legal precedents about search, subpoenas, plain sight, surveillance in public spaces, etc... that really took for granted that police effort was limited and that enforcement would be imperfect.

But they break down when you read all the license plates, or you can subpoena anyone's email, or... whatever.

Making the laws rigid and having perfect enforcement has a cost-- but just the baseline cost to privacy and the squashing of innocent transgression is a cost.

(A counterpoint: a lot of selective law enforcement came down to whether you were unpopular or unprivileged in some way... cheaper and automated enforcement may take some of these effects away and make things more fair. Discretion in enforcement can lead to both more and less just outcomes).

As in their post:

"The future of software is not open. It is not closed. It is liberated, freed from the constraints of licenses written for a world in which reproduction required effort, maintained by a generation of developers who believed that sharing code was its own reward and have been comprehensively proven right about the sharing and wrong about the reward."

This applies to open-source but also very well to proprietary software too ;) Reversing your competitors' software has never been easier!

There’s the old approach of hanging a wanted poster and asking people to “call us if you see this guy”. Then there’s the new approach matching faces in a comprehensive database and camera networks.

The later is just the perfect, efficient implementation of the former. But it’s… different somehow.

To do this, though, you're going to have to get rid of veto points! A bit hard in our disastrously constitutional system.

In the US, the police do not generally need a warrant to tail you as you go around town, but it is phenomenally expensive and difficult to do so. Cellphone location records, despite largely providing the same information, do require warrants because it provides extremely cheap, scalable tracking of anyone. In other words, we allow the government to acquire certain information through difficult means in hopes that it forces them to be very selective about how they use it. When the costs changed, what was allowed also had to change.

...and there's also a large difference between any of those three shifts, and the secular shift (i.e. through no change in regulatory implementation whatsoever!) that occurs when the majority of traffic begins to consist of autonomous vehicles that have been designed/trained to rigorously follow the posted de jure speed limits, with complete ignorance to the de facto flow-of-traffic speed limits.

Which is to say: even if regulators do literally nothing, they might eventually have to change the letter of the law to better match the de facto spirit of the law, lest we are overcome by a world of robotic "work to rule" inefficiencies built in by private companies CYAing at scale.

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Also, a complete tangent: there's also an even-bigger difference between any of those shifts, and the shift that occurs when traffic calming measures are imposed on the road (narrowing, adding medians, adding curves, etc.) Speed limits are an extremely weird category of regulation, as they try to "prompt" humans to control their behavior in a way that runs directly counter to the way the road has been designed (by the very state imposing the regulations!) to "read" as being high- or low-speed. Ideally, "speed limits" wouldn't be a regulatory cudgel at all; they'd just be an internal analytical calculation on the way to to figuring out how to design the road, so that it feels unsafe to go beyond the "speed limit" speed.

"Costs matter" is one way to say it, probably a lot easier to digest and more popular than the "Quantity has a quality all it's own" quote I've been using, which is generally attributed to Stalin which is a little bit of a problem.

But it's absolutely true! Flock ALPRs are equivalent to a police officer with binoculars and a post-it for a wanted vehicle's make, model, and license plate, except we can put hundreds of them on the major intersections throughout a city 24/7 for $20k instead of multiplying the police budget by 20x.

A warrant to gather gigabytes of data from an ISP or email provider is equivalent to a literal wiretap and tape recorder on a suspect's phone line, except the former costs pennies to implement and the later requires a human to actually move wires and then listen for the duration.

Speed cameras are another excellent example.

Technology that changes the cost of enforcement changes the character of the law. I don't think that no one realizes this. I think many in office, many implementing the changes, and many supporting or voting for those groups are acutely aware and greedy for the increased authoritarian control but blind to the human rights harms they're causing.

Meaning that democratizing our existing political structures is a reality today and can be done effectively (think blockchain, think zero knowledge proofs).

On the other hand, the political struggle to actually enact this new democratic system will be THE defining struggle of our times.

> Blindly translating those centuries of laws into rigid, free enforcement is a terrible idea for everyone.

I understand your point that changing the enforcement changes how the law is "felt" even though on the paper the law has not changed. And I think it makes sense to review and potentially revise the laws when enforcement methods change. But in the specific case of the 55 mph limit, would the consequences really be grave and terrible if the enforcement was enforced by a robot, but the law remained the same?

If we wanted to strictly enforce speed limits, we would put governors on engines. However, doing that would cause a lot of harm to normal people. That's why we don't do it.

Stop and think about what it means to be human. We use judgement and decide when we must break the laws. And that is OK and indeed... expected.

(There are other problems, I know, but the regulations are crazy).

I think that the failure to distinguish them is due to a really childish outlook on law and government that is encouraged by people who are simple-minded (because it is easy and moralistic) and by people who are in control of law and government (because it extends their control to social enforcement.)

I don't think any discussion about government, law, or democracy is worth anything without an analysis of government that actually looks at it - through seeing where decisions are made, how those decisions are disseminated, what obligations the people who receive those decisions have to follow them and what latitude they have to change them, and ultimately how they are carried out: the endpoint of government is the application of threats, physical restraint, pain, or death in order to prevent people from doing something they wish to do or force them to do something they do not wish to do, and the means to discover where those methods should be applied. The police officer, the federal agent, the private individual given indemnity from police officers and federal agencies under particular circumstances, the networked cameras pointed into the streets are government. Government has a physical, material existence, a reach.

Democracy is simpler to explain under that premise. It's the degree to which the people that this system controls control the decisions that this system carries out. The degree to which the people who control the system are indemnified from its effects is the degree of authoritarianism. Rule by the ungoverned.

It's also why the biggest sign of political childishness for me are these sort of simple ideas of "international law." International law is a bunch of understandings between nations that any one of them can back out of or simply ignore at any time for any reason, if they are willing to accept the calculated risk of consequences from the nations on the other side of the agreement. It's like national law in quality, but absolutely unlike it in quantity. Even Costa Rica has a far better chance of ignoring, without any long-term cost, the mighty US trying to enforce some treaty regulation than you as an individual have to ignore the police department.

Laws were constructed under this reality. If we hypothetically programmed those laws into unstoppable Terminator-like robots and told them to enforce them without question it would just be a completely different circumstance. If those unstoppable robots had already existed with absolute enforcement, we would have constructed the laws with more precision and absolute limitations. We wouldn't have been able to avoid it, because after a law was set the consequences would have almost instantly become apparent.

With no fuzziness, there's no selective enforcement, but also no discretion (what people call selective enforcement they agree with.) If enforcement has blanket access and reach, there's also no need to make an example or deter. Laws were explicitly formulated around these purposes, especially the penalties set. If every crime was caught current penalties would be draconian, because they implicitly assume that everyone who got caught doing one thing got away with three other things, and for each person who was caught doing a thing three others got away with doing that thing. It punishes for crimes undetected, and attempts to create fear in people still uncaught.

An interesting read, however I'd like to know how to stop websites from screwing around with my scrollbars. In this case it's hidden entirely. Why is this even a thing websites are allowed to do - to change and remove browser UI elements? It makes no sense even, because I have no idea where I am on the page, or how long it is, without scrolling to the bottom to check. God I miss 2005.