Steem has smart contracts but they are very simple. Voting, Steem dollars and Steem power. Using this kind of simple smart contract to augment humans is the way forward. AI will not be trustworthy for a long time yet... I remember bugs from windows 95 that were still in windows xp... AI is very complex and debugging it will take a long, long time, even if there is already many useful things come from the research.
We can't yet trust our money to it, and we can't trust governments either. Automated, distributed real-time voting is now possible and reliable. Soon it will be plain that either the State confesses it's democracy is a sham, or we do away with it and have holocracy, real-time block chain legislation, no representatives and elected judges who can be ousted in minutes after a bad decision...
Exactly, Steem smart contracts are simple; however if you are involved in a decentralised venture capital company that is trying to decide on complex financing and refinancing deals, you need humans; otherwise prepare to lose a lot of money :-)
Cg
Why do you think banks are still using Cobol?
Banking math is trivially easy, but a mistake is extremely costly.
I will say that I will trust a smart contract over a contract. A smart contract, even if it doesn't quite do what it says it does on the package, does exactly what it does. A contract is soooo open for interpretation. Basically when the derivatives market goes boom, it will be years before anyone knows what the fallout will actually be (because of how entangled all the contracts are.)
Good points; I just think smart contracts can't handle decision making; which is more the point I was trying to make.
Cg
I feel that computers will never be able to handle decision making.
Like, do you want a red car or a blue car?
After we figure out how many of what color (5 blue, and 3 red) the computer can optimize the process of painting the cars in order to use the least time and materials.
I feel that what is really missing from smart contracts is actually language.
We have so messed up english, that a person from a hundred years ago would have a hard time, because many of the words meant the opposite of what we use now.
So, the language ; bought, shipped, delivered, paid will all need to be worked out in specific. And many of them will have subtle differences that will be codified. shipped.ups, shipped.ground...
And then the action verbs will be where things get tricky, but I feel that a whole set of made-up sounding words will become the vogue. Like uponShipping, manufacturizing...
Each of these words will correlate with specific verifiable points in process, and thus be useable in a programmatic algorithm. Then it will be as simple as A + B + C = payment.
Yes