Thread by @hexapode

1/ I believe rules as code will be the most important societal and technological change of the 2020's. It will be impacting both the physical and digitals world. But what is it? and why is it important? Or why you should care? 👇 #rulesascode

2/ Today society is governed by the Rules of Law, Regulation and Contract that independent participating actors abide to. You have no choose, you need to obey law.

3/ Overtime these rules gain in complexity and length. They are written in legalese, a different language than the common language with its own vocabulary and sentences structures. You also need training to be able to fully understand them, or ask a trained lawyer.

4/ Studies show that 8 out of 10 people do not understand their insurance contract. Reading an internet company terms and conditions for a website can take hours.

5/ Being hard to comprehend for humans these rules are also impossible to apprehend for computers. The general approach when you need to have a computer system to follow a contract / regulation / law is to hardcode the needed knowledge in the process.

6/ This process takes time, and is subject to the quality of the interpretation of the human that wrote the code.
Rules also have a tendency to change over time which mean that you need to maintain your process over time to continue to follow them.

7/ This was ok when the digital world was in its infancy and had limited impact on the real world, this is getting more and more problematic today as the digital world has more and more impact in the real world.

8/ Imagine that you are a self-driving car company. You need to produce a self driving system that abides to local road regulations. But what happens if a country decides to change the default speed limit on certain roads, or to impose a 5 seconds stop at stop signs?

9/ In today's world the company that builds the self-driving car will need to update its software to allow the car to follow the new regulation.

10/ This means that the company needs to pay some people to closely watch the evolution of road regulation in every country where it has activities, then when change arises, it will need to use engineering ressources to patch the system.

11/ Once the system is patched, it will need to be tested, maybe re-certified then deployed to all cars on the road.

12/ All this process is time and capital intensive. What happens if the company that has built the self driving system goes bankrupt? Who will be in charge to maintain the compatibility to regulation?

13/ You may end up with hundreds of thousands of cars that do not follow the regulation anymore, therefore making the dangerous to drive on the road. Regulator could decide to forbid them. Most likely scenario is the problem will be discover after fatals car crashes.

14/ A solution will be to not have hard-coded the regulation in the self driving process in the first place. But instead to have a way to access the current regulation in a computer understandable form. Meet Rules as Code.

15/ Once you have Rules as Code, you can have an API to a regulation, contract or law. All of a sudden you don’t need anymore to hard-code the regulation in every process. This will allow digital systems interacting with the real world to be automatically compliant.

16/ Once you have Rules as Code, you can not hide compliance to the law in the digital world under the rug because it is ’too complicated’, and you will have more enforceable rules, with a means to verify enforcement.

17/ This will impact predatory startups such as Uber or AirBnb that try to use on the complication of local law to evade them for their own gain, often to the detriment of other actors in the society.

18/ With Rules as Code, you will be able to use technology to explain rules to humans. What if instead of having to read tax code to understand my taxation, I could have a website generating simple but accurate diagrams that are tailor made for me?

19/ Once you have Rules as Code, you can easily do code analysis of your rules. You can detect ‘Code Smell’ and be able to automatically pin point to the part of a rules that is duplicate or un-necessary complicated, therefore driving simplification efforts.

20/ Actually, having Rules as Code as a generally deployed technology will have tremendous impact on everything. This is why I believe it will be the most transformative technology of the 2020’s.

21/ But is it not science fiction you may ask?

22/ Actually it is already here, just not generally distributed.

23/ I made it my personal goal for this decade to make it generally available everywhere.

24/ I have spent the last 3-4 years of my life working quietly on this subject, from now on I will be more vocal, and will try to publicly advocate and explain why Rules as Code are desirable and what are their impacts as much as I can.

25/ This starts with the format of the Rules as code itself that should be Open, Interoperable and Standard. This also includes the actual way used to edit the Rules. It needs to be simple enough that a layman can edit rules as code without assistance from a Computer Scientist.