AI is complex. Complexity means bugs. Bugs in smart contracts are exactly what you need to avoid.

Security is one problem with smart contracts, but lack of applications is another one. AI may make the security problem worse, but it's needed for many potential applications of smart contracts. For example, suppose I want to pay someone to build a website for me that is standards conforming, informative, and aesthetically pleasing. Without an AI that can make human-like judgements, to create a smart contract where "the code is the contract", I'd have to mathematically define each of those adjectives, which would be impossibly difficult or many orders of magnitude more costly than just building the website.

With AI you just have some other input stream that someone might tamper with.

The solution to this would be to have each of the contracting parties provide evidence to the AI, which could include digitally signed (authenticated) data from third parties (security camera operators, shipping companies, etc.), and have the AI make judgments about them the same way a human judge would.

ok, for some context here, I think a lot of people are getting hung up on the words "contract" or "smart contract".

If we want to talk about it intelligently it helps to taboo the term "contract" or else people get terribly terribly confused like in some of the existing comments.

I'm going to say "independent program" instead of "smart contract" for clarity

Ethereum allows for the existence of independent programs which can hold and transfer money. The rules have to be hardcoded into them when you create them. They cannot be changed once launched.

For example if you wanted to create a prize fund for people who've factored large numbers you could create an independent program which accepts a set of numbers, decides if they're the prime factors of another number and if it is then it transfers a prize fund to the first person to do so.

Years later, someone factors the number, connects and gets their payment.

You might be a thousand years dead but the independent program is still in the system and has control of the funds.

Depending on how you write it you may even not be able to retrieve the funds yourself without solving the problem.

It doesn't matter if a court orders you to pay out because they have a law declaring pi to be exactly three and someone has come forward with a kooky proof for their "factored" number. If it doesn't match the rules of the program there's nothing you or the court can do.

If you've not given yourself control at the start it will sit there until the end of time until someone actually factors the number.

Or perhaps you set up the program badly and it will accept numbers which aren't the factors as correct and gives a payment to someone who's not factored anything.

it is not a legal contract which says "I will give money to the person who solves this problem", it's a piece of code which, when followed, may give the money in it's control to someone who connects to it depending on the rules programmed into it.

Some funds have been set up controlled by independent programs and their "about" pages tend to say something along the lines of "you're agreeing to the code being followed, anything we write here is just our best try at explaining what the code does, here is the full source code, if you're happy with this then you're free to give control of some funds to this code or a copy of this code"

In the specific case of the project known as 'TheDAO', the terms of service does indeed waive all legal rights and says that whatever the computer program says supersedes all human-world stuff.

I may have missed it, but that is not at all what the link you posted says. It has a waiver of liability against 3rd parties (basically the DAO operation). It does not say that you cannot have liability between to parties subject to a contract, or even seem to mention anything about dispute resolution.

Also, I would like to point out that you CANNOT have a contract that requires an illegal act. For instance, you cannot create a contract that says "Person A waives all legal recourse against Person B if Person B murders them." The act of murder is still illegal even if both parties agree to it.

Finally, the TOS for DAO is not the contract, it is merely the TOS for using the service. So the individual contracts between two people are going to override that.

But you probably could achieve substantially the same effect.

That depends. Courts can, and on occassion do, rewrite contracts (or refuse to enforce them) because they consider the contract to be inequitable or, in simpler terms, unjust.

AI is complex. Complexity means bugs. Bugs in smart contracts are exactly what you need to avoid.

What is needed the most is mathematically proving code.

For certain contract types you're going to need some way of confirming that, say, physical goods have been delivered but you gain nothing my adding AI to the mix.

Without AI you have a switch someone has to toggle or some other signal that someone might hack. With AI you just have some other input stream that someone might tamper with. Either way you need to accept information into the system somehow and it may not be accurate. AI does not solve the problem. It just adds complexity which makes mistakes more likely.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, when all you have is AI theories everything looks like a problem to throw AI at.

The first story I saw on the main page was "The Metropolitan Man".

I thought "OK, I'll give it 10 minutes, see how far it can get".

After 1,5 minute the story displayed a total lack of understanding of middle-school level physics.

Superman prevented an accident by flying into the space between two cars and stopping them with his hands. However, a deceleration on the distance equal to the length of one human arm, is no less lethal than over the (approximately equal) length of the average crumple zone.

I mean, I don't want to poop on the party, but seriously?

extremely financially secure with lots of reserves

With a couple of hundred thousand dollars? They don't make you financially independent (defined as "don't have to work"), you can't even buy an apartment in SF or NYC, etc...

anything more than a couple hundred K provides little utility at all

How do you know?

I don't think this works out, if you think you are agreeing with Villiam. Suppose your net worth is $20,000. Then the utility increase represented by $100 is going to be [proportional to] 0.00498. On the other hand, the utility increase represented by $10,000 is going to be [proportional to] 0.40546. That is, $10,000 will be 81 times as valuable as $100.

In other words, it is less than 100 times as valuable. But not by that much, and certainly not by enough to explain the degree to which people prefer the certain $100.

Utility is approximately the logarithm of money. Pretend otherwise, and you will get results that go against the intuition, duh.

Utility is linear to money only if we take such a small part of the logarithmic curve that it is more or less linear at the given interval. But this is something you cannot extrapolate to situations where the part of the logarithmic curve is significantly curved. Two examples of linearity:

1) You are a millionaire, so you more or less don't give a fuck about getting or not getting $1000. In such case you can treat small money as linear and choose B. If you are not a millionaire, imagine that it is about certainty of 24¢ versus 25% chance of $1.

2) You are an effective altruist and you want to donate all the money to a charity that saves human lives. If $1000 is very small compared with the charity budget, we can treat the number of human lives saved as a linear function of extra money given. (See: Circular Altruism.)