&#x27;“It’s always going to follow the rules, I mean, almost to a point where human drivers who get in the car and are like ‘Why is the car doing that?’” said Tom Supple, a Google safety driver during a recent test drive on the streets near Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters.&#x27;<p>This is a drum that, like privacy and encryption, we techies need to start banging hard before it&#x27;s too late. The fact that laws are <i>fundamentally</i> limited by our abilities to enforce them, and that laws are <i>fundamentally</i> written to be enforced by humans with some discretion, is such a deep assumption for us that we don&#x27;t see it. We irrationally tend to conceive of a law that says &quot;It is a felony to wear your hair in a ponytail on a Tuesday&quot; as an absolute, even though what it really means is &quot;If a police officer spots you with your hair in a ponytail on a Tuesday, and by their discretion arrests you, and at the discretion of a prosecutor charges you, who at the discretion of a judge and jury convicts you, you will be guilty of a felony.&quot; <i>All</i> laws actually say that, but that&#x27;s not how we humans speak or conceptualize them. Also note the importance of a human even spotting the violation in the first place.<p>So, naturally, when we get technology that can rigidly enforce law, we don&#x27;t program them with the &quot;real&quot; law, we program them with the <i>text</i> of the law. But the truth is, <i>the text was never passed as a law</i>. When the law was deliberated, everybody was <i>really</i> deliberating the version that involves all the human discretion, and prior to the introduction of computers, the law that was really enforced was the one with all the human discretion. A rigidly-enforced-by-computer law is a <i>fundamentally different law</i>, in the most concrete way possible; actions that you would never have been penalized by the human law result in immediate penalty in the computer world. There&#x27;s no more concrete way to prove the point that it is a fundamentally different law.<p>We CAN NOT simply translate the text of the law into computer programs. If we are going to do computer enforcement of laws (and I&#x27;m going to drop the question of whether that&#x27;s a good idea, feel free to debate in replies), we <i>must</i> write new law. By that, I do not merely mean that society has an obligation to write new laws, but that the very act of programming a law <i>is</i> writing a new law into existence, one never deliberated by the processes of democracy. We <i>literally</i> can not simply translate laws into programs. It is impossible. The result is not the same law.