Discovered this morning at Naked Capitalism.com Links. Unlike other links it goes directly to a .pdf
The political economy of tax laws in the U.S. states Elliott Ash
This is Elliot Ash. He has an impressive intelligence. Smart!
Economics is a black magic hocus pocus thing but people like Elliott are defining its information structure scientifically with a formalized language and method that advances the state of Economics toward the status of a real science. Beyond a science that uses the language of mathematics to dress up the ambiguity of economics using an unambiguous language of math.
Natural Language Processing applies the nature of natural language to a more rigorous structure of a formalized language with a reduction in ambiguity. Not to the extent of an artificial programming language but taking a big step in that direction. If the state of the art in NLP only went halfway as far as a formal seemless integrated object oriented macro structure and micro implementation design programming language and method it would be a quantum leap for the field of Economics.
I thing it is smart guys like Elliott that will take and make that leap.
Law in general and tax law that Elliott analyzes is a highly refined form of Natural Language structure. It is intended to reduce ambiguity but it is essentially an art in the use of refined and purposed natural language transition to a science. Coding in tax law using formalized natural language is about as far as it can go without a paradigm shift to a language that usher its structured information domain to a higher level language to define code as well as implementation.
The state of the art in rapid advancement of NLP and Artificial Intelligence has relationship to government investment in intelligence gathering and processing as well as commercial profit oriented objectives. The way I see it, all this investment is going to have a social science pay off in establishing the methodology of taking the big step of the 21st century to the Information Age.
That next big step?
Law. Governance. Renewal of the social contract expressed in less ambiguous terms to advance the general welfare and the common good. As the ambiguity of the law is reduced in the domain of Economics there will be less abuse and better redistribution of.......whatever we choose to be a better redistribution of the pursuit of happiness on a level playing field justice.
After all....Law does have something to do with justice. There is an end purpose to all that law.
So....this is all preface to diving into what Elliott wrote. I read it all this morning and was fascinated by it. Skipping ever so lightly past the math to sections of how the NLP parsing was done. Mathbabe would probably enjoy the math part. I hope she comments on the Naked Capitalism link.
This is a foot in the door blog entry. I intend to study what Elliott has written for a couple of reasons. It is an excellent example of applying NLP to an existing body of natural language expression that depends on a formalized objective and structured narrative method of creating an operating system and its application programs. That is a domain better done by computers and their languages and Information Age structures.
The door, so to speak is one that the written body of law must go through to enter the Information Age. The front end of the Law will always be narrative but the extension of Law of the Land must seemlessly extend to a formalize information system with its own Operating System and Application Programs.
Law must go through the same paradigm shift door that Money must go through. Money as currency that I write about in this blog. It is the same problem domain with the same micro/macro, granular/aggregate structure and Information Engineering integration. Both require an informed public.
Alas! Judging from the current state of world and national affairs we have a long way to go to create and informed public through educational systems. There are few specialized thought leaders that have the Information Engineering education and ability to use the refined languages of today. Hopes for a new generation that will have that ability are slim because the new generation is generally an end product user of the information and environment created by systems that they do not understand and are probably content in their ignorance. What does that make them? Objects of extraction by as system that they have no control over.
That is the big divide between the haves and the have nots. Money is only the score keeper of those few that are adept at manipulating either the legacy profit making system or the new hybrid of legacy structures enhanced by Information Age tools.
It does not take the entire population to understand the new level of NLP. Just enough to be a tipping point for change. While we are founded on liberty and justice for all it does not always mean that we all must understand the operating system and application programs that deliver it. That is a function of specialization. What is necessary is that there be a majority of citizens that recognize that the system of our social governance is a technical information structure and entrust its development and operation to those educated and gifted to manage it for our welfare.
Elliot seems to have the potential to be someone that goes beyond and understanding of what Economics does in its application programs but what it is, and should be in code. A code that is to be written in a higher level language that emerges from the cradle of Natural Language Processing.
A lawyer's office lined with law books is an iconic joke. They all migrated to searchable linked text on a computer. A good first step enabled by the technology that gave us the internet and the World Wide Web. The information structure however remains embodied in book format above which the higher order information structure is a basically a body of knowledge residing in the heads of its practitioners. Extracting that higher level structure and knowledge and expressing it in a formalized structure with a higher level language beyond natural language is an exciting development.
I wish I could be around to see the end of the century result! I hope it will go where I foresee that it will.
I'm an optimist.
https://blog.law.cornell.edu/voxpop/tag/legal-natural-language-processing/
Perhaps our pursuit of Artificial Intelligence will make us more naturally intelligent.
No comments:
Post a Comment