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32 - Law in Turing’s Cathedral

Notes on the Algorithmic Turn of the Legal Universe

from Part VI - Applications and Future Directions of Law and Algorithms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 October 2020

Woodrow Barfield
Affiliation:
University of Washington
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Summary

We live in an algorithmic world. There is currently no area of our lives that has not been touched by computation and its language and tools. Since when, in the early 1940s, a small group of people led by John von Neumann gathered to turn into reality the vision of a universal computing machine, humankind is experiencing a sort of permanent revolution in which our understanding of the world and our ways of acting on it are steadily transformed by the steps forward we make in processing information. Such a condition is vividly depicted by Alan Turing in one of the founding documents of the quest for artificial intelligence (AI): “in attempting to construct machines … we are providing mansions for the souls.”1 Computers and algorithms can be seen as the building blocks of a new, ever-expanding building – a cathedral, to use George Dyson’s metaphor2 – in which every human activity is going to be shaped by the digital architecture hosting it.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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