● Concept explainer
Law as a prompt
When law becomes an executable scenario for agents, its ambiguity turns from flexibility into a source of error. The Agentic State needs law that can be checked and tested in a model before it affects people — with a clearly drawn zone of human judgment.
Ambiguity is a virtue of human law and a defect of executable law. The boundary between them must be drawn deliberately.
From text to instruction
Human law lives in interpretation: judges and officials fill a norm with meaning in context. When an agent executes the norm, it turns into an instruction — and the indeterminacy that once gave flexibility now produces unpredictable behaviour at scale.
Hence the idea of law as a living, testable scenario: norms should be executable and verifiable before they affect a person.
Scenario democracy
If a law can be modelled, its consequences can be checked in advance: whom it helps, whom it unfairly harms, where it breaks. This turns lawmaking into a discipline of simulation — reforms are tested in a model before they break someone’s life.
But not everything should become code. Part of law deliberately leaves room for discretion — and this zone of human judgment must be protected, not automated.