I realize that was probably satire or sarcasm or both, but since I've seen people actually seriously take that position I'm going to go ahead and respond as if it was serious.
How do these smart contract deal with the real world? I can see how they can work for things that entirely involve activities that take place on the block chain (e.g., a smart contract that automatically pays a crowd funded project if and only if it meets a threshold for pledges by a deadline, and refunds the donors otherwise).
But suppose our contract is something like I will pay you $X in Ethereum when you deliver to me 125 bales of Surat cotton, guaranteed to be middling fair merchant's Dhollorah [1], delivered at the Liverpool docks from Bombay on the next sailing of the Peerless.
How do we put all of that into a smart contract? Can a smart contract trigger payment only when the cotton arrives? Can it check to make sure it arrived on the ship specified in the contract?
And what happens if it turns out that there are two ships named Peerless, unrelated to each other, one of which is sailing from Bombay to Liverpool in October, and one in December? I only know about the December one, and it is on that one that I'm expecting the cotton. You only know about the October one, and so it is on that one you send the cotton. The cotton arrives before I'm ready to deal with.
Unless dealing with all that can be included in the smart contract, and executed by the smart contract without human intervention, lawyers will still be needed...and they will be needed almost as much as they are now.
PS: my cotton hypothetical is based on a real case: Raffles v Wichelhaus, EWHC Exch J19, (1864) 2 Hurl & C 906. There really were two unrelated ships both having and neither deserving the name Peerless, and both working the India / England trade routes, both scheduled for Bombay to Liverpool, one in October and one in December.
[1] Dhollorah is a very dirty cotton of a longish staple, which when cleared is very white, as if bleached. For for more than you probably ever wanted to know on this and other types of cotton, see the book "Cotton Spinning and Weaving: A Practical and Theoretical Treatise" by Herbert Edward Walmsley, page 71. It's from the late 19th century and is public domain now I believe, and you can find it on Google Books.
>How do these smart contract deal with the real world? I can see how they can work for things that entirely involve activities that take place on the block chain (e.g., a smart contract that automatically pays a crowd funded project if and only if it meets a threshold for pledges by a deadline, and refunds the donors otherwise).
They can't deal with the real world by themselves, but where they have value in agreements involving real world events is that they allow the real world assessments to be debundled from those aspects of the agreement that can be formalized.
So in the cotton shipment example, the smart contract would have three parties assigned as Oracles that determine whether the correct ship arrives at the correct port on its correct trip. The smart contract would dictate that if 2 out of 3 of the Oracles agree that the condition has been met, then the smart contract will transfer the funds. There could also be a failsafe clause in the smart contract, that is controlled by a set of five oracles, who have the power to override the smart contract if the majority deem that an expected event occurred.
So yes you need human intervention, but only for those parts that cannot be automated. This explicit definition of what the human roles are may encourage better contracts, by forcing the counterparties to spend more time reasoning about which aspects of the smart contract are subject to ambiguity.
Didn't you just describe an example where the ambiguity of human language is a problem and a smart contract may actually have a better chance of performing as expected?
Why do you asssume smart contracts can't be ambiguous? A lot of people read the DAO contract, and yet it took a hacker a while to find a small error -- if I recall correctly it was a capitalization error -- that triggered an unexpected exit path.
At some point you have to ask yourself whether we really prefer that code be law, with the quality of code that's so common these days, or whether we actually like being able to specify something to a lawyer -- rather than a computer -- simply because the lawyer will return the contract and ask for clarification if something is ambiguous/unclear.
The human-to-lawyer interface is the best contract interface that exists, the only reason we use computers is because they're so cheap and fast. When we dream of AI we dream of having a computerized lawyer, who can ask clarifying questions and resolve ambiguity before it becomes a problem.
If tomorrow I sign a contract with my mobile phone carrier and it turns out that through some loophole in the contract they get entitled to the kidneys of my first born daughter then clearly I have a case to go to a tribunal and get it overturned as it's obviously not a reasonable clause.
I think people arguing that "code is law" (which is simply a modern form of "letter-ism") don't really know what they wish for. I guess is many are going to change their minds when those attacks get more and more common and they lose a ton of money because of an unforeseen and obviously unintended flaw in the contract code.
I feel like anything humans can use to communicate to each other could be considered a human language.
More relevantly, creating a synthetic language that's a subset of natural languages will mean that multiple natural concepts will map onto the same synthetic one.
> How do we put all of that into a smart contract? Can a smart contract trigger payment only when the cotton arrives? Can it check to make sure it arrived on the ship specified in the contract?
I've not worked with smart contracts personally, so take it with a grain of salt, but...
This problem seems to be mostly solved by the information available in shipping manifests; the locations of loading and unloading, the consignee (buyer), container ids, description of goods... all there in a publicly available (at cost) record.
The real difficulty has more to do with verifying the quality - I'll admit I'm at a loss to how that's done today and I can't imagine quality assessors are at the port to verify that container #123 contains the shipment of Grade B+ cotton or map that to an API. As well, what happens when you disagree and your own independent assessor says its Grade B-? This seems like something that would remain up to legal debate; probably denoted in the contract but not verified by it such that lawyers and assessors can handle it should problems arise.
Have you ever been to some old manor or library with hundreds of weathered ancient leather bound books...I always wonder about their contents... (usually they are under lock and key)...Cotton case law now seems a perfectly reasonable assumption.
How do these smart contract deal with the real world? I can see how they can work for things that entirely involve activities that take place on the block chain (e.g., a smart contract that automatically pays a crowd funded project if and only if it meets a threshold for pledges by a deadline, and refunds the donors otherwise).
But suppose our contract is something like I will pay you $X in Ethereum when you deliver to me 125 bales of Surat cotton, guaranteed to be middling fair merchant's Dhollorah [1], delivered at the Liverpool docks from Bombay on the next sailing of the Peerless.
How do we put all of that into a smart contract? Can a smart contract trigger payment only when the cotton arrives? Can it check to make sure it arrived on the ship specified in the contract?
And what happens if it turns out that there are two ships named Peerless, unrelated to each other, one of which is sailing from Bombay to Liverpool in October, and one in December? I only know about the December one, and it is on that one that I'm expecting the cotton. You only know about the October one, and so it is on that one you send the cotton. The cotton arrives before I'm ready to deal with.
Unless dealing with all that can be included in the smart contract, and executed by the smart contract without human intervention, lawyers will still be needed...and they will be needed almost as much as they are now.
PS: my cotton hypothetical is based on a real case: Raffles v Wichelhaus, EWHC Exch J19, (1864) 2 Hurl & C 906. There really were two unrelated ships both having and neither deserving the name Peerless, and both working the India / England trade routes, both scheduled for Bombay to Liverpool, one in October and one in December.
[1] Dhollorah is a very dirty cotton of a longish staple, which when cleared is very white, as if bleached. For for more than you probably ever wanted to know on this and other types of cotton, see the book "Cotton Spinning and Weaving: A Practical and Theoretical Treatise" by Herbert Edward Walmsley, page 71. It's from the late 19th century and is public domain now I believe, and you can find it on Google Books.