Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-pjpqr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-02T11:21:19.573Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

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
Get access

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.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×