To commemorate the tenth anniversary of the publication of my 2013 law review article “Gödel’s Loophole” (my most downloaded paper by far), I just posted to SSRN a new work-in-progress titled “Gödel’s Loophole 2.0“, which is now available here. (I will be presenting this paper at the annual meeting of the Academy of Legal Studies in Business this week.) In summary, my previous work from ten years ago conjectured that Gödel’s loophole in the domain of constitutional law refers to constitutional self-reference, i.e. an amendment to a constitution’s amendment clause.

My new article extends the general logic of Gödel’s loophole to two new domains. One is the field of artificial intelligence and a new proposal known as “constitutional AI”, a self-regulating system for minimizing the harmful effects of large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and DeepMind. (See here, for example.) The other domain is the planet Mars. Although as of this writing the possibility of permanent human settlements on Mars is still far off, several draft constitutions of various lengths and levels of complexity have already been proposed for Mars! (See here, here, and here.) Alas, neither “constitutional AI” nor the sundry Martian constitutions are immune from the inexorable logic of Gödel’s loophole.