Legis Informatica

Dead tired aftera two-day conference on Roman Law. Stipulatio looks like an archaic way of arriving at an agreement. Until you realize that transactions protocols proceed by query and response. The web is buzzing with the ghosts of dead Roman formulae. 

Strangely, this is my best takeaway from the whole thing (don't ask me how we got here, though): Visceral fear of death and destruction is the key to well-regulated autonomous programs. Robots have to learn that we can fuck them up.