I agree, lawmakers benefit because lay people cannot understand the laws being passed.
That said, this is the secret. We market this to the law writers!
Getting to a point where we have 10x productivity gain will be hard but after that any tool with a 10x productivity win will be adopted. That is a no brainier.
Now we are in a future where all laws are written in this new syntax, but shared as long compiled documents full of redundant legalese English.
In such a future, lawyers can write law and contracts easily but cannot read them efficiently. Imagine writing JavaScript but debugging the assembly...
Lawyers would naturally start asking their peers to share the "source" rather than the compiled "binary", for evaluation. It is just a no brainier.
Now you have a future with a flurishing new syntax dominating the entire ecosystem. Hopefully better languages are created, etc. You even have an entire generation of lawyers who only know these higher level languages.
This isn't an overnight solution but by the time lawmakers realize the trend of higher level syntax is going to hurt their ability to hide truth, the game will already have been changed.
Just in case it isn't; we'd all benefit from laws that ordinary people can read, understand and follow.
When the quantity of law grows so great and complicated that nobody can feasibly read it becomes hard to be a law abiding citizen. Lawyers, despite rumors otherwise, are ordinary people too and benefit from clearly written law, in English for English speaking countries.
It wasn't satire, but I enjoy that you thought it was :)
I agree that society benefits when we have succinct, easily understandable laws for lay people.
That said we are currently moving father away from that target, rather than nearer.
I would argue software is doing the opposite. It started extremely obscure and has slowly but surely moved in a direction where a majority of people can learn to understand it in months.
Example, a 3 month "bootcamp" can now teach a lay person to write HTML, CSS and JavaScript and accurately predict the output of the interconnections of millions (billions?) of lines on code.
You might argue the bootcampers don't truly understand what the kernel is doing. This is the point though, thanks to abstraction, they can grok it without needing to dive deep.
I don't think there will ever exist a world where lay people will understand legalese. However, I do believe we can build a world where people can be trivially self taught and then grok new laws, and even write new laws of their own.
HTML, CSS and Javascript are not comparably complex.
In software engineering we can set scope and conceptual boundaries.
Law cannot. It is complex because the world is complex. Unless you have a mechanism for simplifying human nature, the law will continue to require specialists.
That said, this is the secret. We market this to the law writers!
Getting to a point where we have 10x productivity gain will be hard but after that any tool with a 10x productivity win will be adopted. That is a no brainier.
Now we are in a future where all laws are written in this new syntax, but shared as long compiled documents full of redundant legalese English.
In such a future, lawyers can write law and contracts easily but cannot read them efficiently. Imagine writing JavaScript but debugging the assembly...
Lawyers would naturally start asking their peers to share the "source" rather than the compiled "binary", for evaluation. It is just a no brainier.
Now you have a future with a flurishing new syntax dominating the entire ecosystem. Hopefully better languages are created, etc. You even have an entire generation of lawyers who only know these higher level languages.
This isn't an overnight solution but by the time lawmakers realize the trend of higher level syntax is going to hurt their ability to hide truth, the game will already have been changed.