Stephen Wolfram is developing a symbolic discourse language for smart contracts and AI oracles

Omnibus might have been a poor word choice.

I was expecting, from the title, that the article would describe a smart contract language.

Instead, I found it described what such a language might require, from the point of view of someone who has never listened to a talk by Nick Szabo on the topic, or the talks at DevCon2.

And that's a perfectly fine thing to do, if you are talking to the general populace about how one might convert a contract to code.

I also found myself disagreeing with him on a few points.

I found a single comment from Nick (just before the Dao hack at IFTF) to be more enlightening (I'm mostly paraphrasing because this talk was very sadly not recorded): "[Ethereum] has lots of smart [coders]. But lawyers have been dealing with all the corner cases for thousands of years, and [the Ethereum community] could really benefit from collaborating more with them."

I also suspect that significant near-term advances will come from coders and lawyers collaborating to merge law and code.

Nick didn't even get a mention in Wolframs article, which seems a shame to me.

After Wolfram describes symbolic discourse languages as applied to smart contracts, he makes some good guesses:

"I suspect, one will use the symbolic discourse language to define what amount to goals, and then one will have to use machine-learning kinds of methods to fill in how to define a contract that actually achieves them."

Fine. But even without machine learning applied to smart contract languages, and even without mapping a relatively complete symbolic discourse language to a smart contract language, there is so much work to do, and such astonishing progress being made on that work.

I feel like Nick's guess is much better. We will keep up the ridiculous pace of progress on smart contract development ( and formal verification and so on ), while we bring in legal minds to hone our language and make it practical for expressing what really needs to be done in the field of law.

Using machine learning to augment a symbolic discourse language is a neat idea. I'll give him that. But I think that will take place via oracles, and not as part of a smart contract language.

Finally, he spirals outward from machine learning to dangerous AI, a fun thing to do. In doing so, he asks a lot of questions and doesn't attempt to answer them.

So although he is generally proposing a "language" that is more complex than any smart contract language as we know it today, I felt he had a lot more questions than answers, and the article could have benefitted from the practical experience of the Ethereum development community.

I could be wrong, but I believe that these more complex systems that Wolfram envisions will probably be built as they are today for a good long while - composited via communication between tight, small, smart contracts and large, external systems like oracles.

Perhaps wide-ranging would have been better than omnibus.

Introducing me to Ramon Llull was pretty awesome, though. That's going to take up the rest of the evening at least.