Background

In the law, there exists a distinction in notions of justice between justice arising from the correct procedures having been followed and justice arising from the correct outcome having been reached. The same distinction exists in programming techniques, where most focus on describing the algorithm (procedure) explicitly, and leaving the outcome (goal) implicit, but some techniques (called declarative) invert this, and describe the goal explicitly, and only implicitly derive an algorithm to reach the goal.

In both law and software, the focus on procedure has come at the expense of reaching the desired outcomes. In both, it began with a promise of simplicity - procedures are easier to describe and to prescribe than outcomes, and it is easier to tell whether a procedure has been followed than whether a goal has been reached. But the relationship of any given procedure to the outcome it is intended to reach is tenuous - and the collection of subtle and gross variations of procedure needed to consistently reach a goal in varying circumstances quickly grows impossible to manage.

I believe this phenomenon to be responsible for the explosive growth in complexity observed across law, bureaucracy, and software as they mature, and which brings about their collapse, as described by Tainter in his work, The Collapse of Complex Societies. In my career as a software engineer, I regularly confronted the resulting pathologies, and recoiled from them, taking up a project to embrace the paradigm of programming in terms of explicit goals, and leaving the algorithm for the system to derive implicitly, and I hope that technology might also be a foundation for tools to organize law and society in a similar way, and to help both software projects and social entities avoid the atrophy and collapse that follows from the overgrowth of complexity of procedure.

In concrete terms, this has led me to develop for software the paradigm of information-gain computation, of which the most comprehensive description so far is in this workshop paper. Its key innovation is to develop a general-purpose measure of the progress of a computation in terms of the information gained about a query. It uses this measure of progress to optimize the choices made in evaluating the query. Those choices, in turn, implicitly determine the algorithms used, but that implicit choice remains contextualized so that the choice can continue to be adapted as circumstances change.

The net effect is to relieve humans of the burden of managing the combinatorial explosion of complexity that results from translating goals to procedures, and to keep humans from being the bottleneck in the iterative process of adapting procedures to changing circumstances.

My original technical motivation for developing this was to make smart contracts purely goal-directed, and in turn to open up the use of sophisticated financial tools to people working at the level of sophistication of spreadsheet users running small businesses. (Smart contracts are computer programs that can be used to define financial assets and carry out financial transactions automatically; seminal work on how to formalize them rigorously and elegantly is here. However, the technology applies to all of software, and the concepts, and perhaps the tools as well, may apply to all of law and bureaucracy. My most far-reaching hope is to build out of this an antidote to the kafkaesque horror and waste and human tragedy of living in a society whose institutions are defined as procedural bureacracies, by giving primacy to outcomes, so that procedures can no longer be systematically corrupted and outcomes systematically betrayed.

Proposals For Discussion

I could use a lot more background on humanities work on the kafkaesque horror of bureaucracy, and on the injustice inherent in procedural notions of justice.

I am also curious about general feedback / impressions, and how this line of inquiry might fit in with other work going on in this field.

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It has long been our contention, that we are not the only ones doing Critical Code Studies, that CCS builds on the practices and conversations well underway in the world of programming and computer science. I wonder if there are other communities in the wild where there are regularly posted or even irregularly posted discussions that we can benefit from for our Critical Code Studies.

What are other online forums or communities, where we can turn for insight into readings of code? Have you used any of these (in this way)?

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