MIT Automated or Autonomous Legal Entity Challenge
This MIT Media Lab repository and GitHub Pages site is for the Human Dynamics research group open source project to describe and design an automated or autonomous valid legal entity.
This project aims to 1. define key design goals for automated or autonomous valid legal entities, 2. define objective measures for evaluating whether or the extent to which proposed designs and implementations achieve the design goals; 3. provide a simple process for open submission of proposed designs and implementations; and 4. provide a process assembling a panel of judges to apply defined objective measures for evaluating proposed designs and implementations.
The initial phase of this project will be to define:
- High level design goals, priority objectives and key use cases;
- Validated business, legal and technical requirements and constraints; and
- Identified objective criteria for testing successful implementation of the design, including functionality, performance, interopeability or conformance with defined success metrics.
The above design goals, implementation requirements and test criteria are being developed by MIT with early iteration on the project wiki.
- Project Wiki: Commentary Page
In addition, informal chat related to this project, including occassional engagement by MIT participants, is happening in a Telegram channel moderated by MIT Media Lab alumni Brenden Maher. A link to request an invitation to join that Telegram channel will be made available.
Proposed Designs for Solving the Challenge
- Law.MIT.edu will provide a simple process for accepting proposed designs including the testing, deployment, ongoing sustainment and evolution of an automated or autonomous valid legal entity;
- Law.MIT.edu will provide or adopt a community forum for the free exchange of questions, ideas, comments, critiques, identified gaps or recommended modifications related to the then current version of requests for proposals, evaluation criteria and implementation testing measures;
Draft Proposal Evaluation Criteria
Law.MIT.edu will publish judging criteria for evaluating how well proposals address:
- High level design goals, priority objectives and key use cases;
- Validated business, legal and technical requirements and constraints;
- Identified objective criteria for testing successful implementation of the design, including functionality, performance, interopeability or conformance with defined success metrics;
Potential criteria for the award of additional points:
- Proposals will receive extra points for including an open source “reference implementation” that correctly and completely instantiates the proposed design;
- Proposals will receive extra points for including a roadmap starting with initial successful implementations of the proposed design and describing a realistic path for achieving further goals, objectives and priorities.
Potential approaches to judging proposals:
In additon to an MIT invited panel of expert judges selected to evaluate proposals, proposals may be evaluated based on:
- “crowd-favorite” ratings by the community of active participants in this project and/or by a larger community;
- objective measures of successful deployment “in the wild”
This repository is a project of the MIT Human Dynamics Lab law.MIT.edu and MIT Computational Law Report research activities. Almost everybody else at MIT has way more authority and decision making power over this project than the project leaders and therefor this project is subject to change at any time, without notice in the sole and infinite discretion of MIT. May nobody important ever become aware we are doing this. Amen.