Preface

        I have been reading an enlightening book titled You Have the Right to Remain Innocent by James Duane, which inspired an idea. The federal criminal code in America is perversely gargantuan and is a clear demonstration of government overreach and hubris. The title of a book by civil liberties lawyer, Harvey Silvergate, Three Felonies a Day[1], refers to the estimate that the average American commits at least three felonies daily without even realizing it. Federal conservation laws prohibit possession of a “short lobster,” yes a lobster that is too small.[2] America clearly has an overcriminalization problem. Day to day, this probably isn’t an issue; what police officer is going to go around measuring your lobsters and arresting you for inadequate lobster size? It’s absurd, but the question still stands. As long as a law is on the books, a police state could use that law to justify an arrest whether the arrest was a morally sound decision or not.

        My peers and I have been so incredibly fortunate to be raised in an environment where despite these insane laws, individual freedoms have generally been upheld, but I have been to countries where those liberties are only reserved for the class of people wealthy enough to pay for them. This issue is also present in America though to expound on that here would lead to a long, dicey tangent, which I don’t shy from, but we have other things to discuss here. The key issues that I want to solve are problems with classism which are often conflated with problems pertaining to racism, though the two often intermingle.

Proposal

        As the title states, we have too many goddamn laws. If you want to stay out of trouble, it’s not enough to follow an internal moral code anymore. I want to create tools in order to tear down some of these horrendous laws and to help revitalize them in order to maintain a legal system that both pass judgement with clear intentions and is flexible to change.

        Normally, you would have to send a reasonably smart child to a knowledge factory for the better part of a decade, spend a small fortune, and then hope that the kid turns out to be a half decent lawyer. Then, maybe that lawyer could spend time reading our vast criminal code and figure out where the absurdities lie. That lawyer would then have to educate the public and run for office to even have the power to come close to effecting change. Turns out legislatures have an incentive to continual pump out haphazard legal documents, because “that’s their job” and that kid turned lawyer turned politician has to review new legislation on top of the flawed ones he discovered before. How old is that bright-eyed kid now? Has he grown tired and jaded by the system or corrupt and hopeless? This isn’t tenable. We need to solve this problem before the kid becomes part of the problem.

        Machines are much more suited for the job of collating data in short periods of time than humans. The only issue is proper classification of the meaning of that data. Until more recently, a computer would not have been able to understand human speech let alone generate meaningful dialogue. Nowadays, with enough processing power and some trickery, object classification and semantic analysis on speech patterns is becoming quite viable.

        So my proposal: build a platform that will analyze legal documents and criminal code and classify semantic patterns with the intention of evaluating contradictions or broad/vague language. If we can spot these problems, we can educate the populace and empower legislature to overturn legal code that is irrelevant and cumbersome to society or work to redraft them. The models generated for solving this problem can also be used to help draft more secure laws in the future, so we can cut down on the necessity of legislative government.

Afterthoughts

        I am not so naive as to think that this idea will be immediately accepted. There are people who are technophobic, and any time you talk about reducing the labor force, people go into a frenzy. Technology has allowed the human race to reclaim so much more time in the form of leisure so that we have the choice to work or play. There’s a possiblity that this is downright impossible, but it’s worth a shot, and I think harder problems have been solved before.

References

[1] Silvergate, Harvey A. (2011). Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent Encounter Books (June 7, 2011)

[2] Duane, James, (2016). You Have the Right to Remain Innocent pg. 18 Little A, New York (2016)