9. The Legal Crossing

So far, functions are performed by the begotten kind. Relax that assumption. Displacement can be written as a moving inequality—when machine capability and cost overtake human. Law faces the same inequality function by function. This chapter conditions on crossing rather than forecasting dates. Structure supplies meaning.

Function-specific ΠH

For each legal function f (research, fact-finding, first-instance judgment, equity, enforcement…), write a human margin in capability-minus-cost form. The function passes when that margin goes negative (or capability outweighs cost, or cheapness outweighs capability gap). Functions load on different coordinates of the human/machine parameter vector—so they flip at different times with different consequences.

Coordinate	Human	Machine advance feels like
Information price	Neural-bound	Improvement
Well-posed inference capability	High, fixed	Improvement (can pass human)
Discount / mortality patience	Mortal hazard	Improvement—and loss of human restraint
Boundedness τ (slowness, stickiness)	Finite friction	“Improvement” that removes protection
Substrate cost	Metabolic floor	Improvement toward Landauer
Throughput / fatigue	Fixed	Improvement

Decisive subtlety: on most coordinates machine advance is unambiguous improvement. On boundedness τ, human value is load-bearing—the friction that keeps the order predictable and force dispersed. Machine superiority there is removal of what the function supplied.

Forced crossing order

Order set by which coordinate each function loads on:

1. Pure inference — research, document review, outcome prediction, standard drafting (machine’s home task; earliest).
2. Synthesis — advice on settled questions, transactions, compliance.
3. Bounded judgment — first-instance adjudication, sentencing, admin determination (real on accuracy/cost; deceptive on value).
4. Discretion / equity — near-zero temperature removes the corrective.
5. Force / enforcement — deathless, copyable, tireless enforcer is the deepest change.
6. Floor-holding — jury, constitutional µ maintenance, dispersal of control—last, when the machine becomes the super-predator the floor required no member to be.

Not an adoption calendar (sticky-then-sudden kinetics lag each flip). An ordering of inequality flips.

No permanent human coordinate

No row permanently secure. Floor-holding is last not because humans are safe there but because that is where machine advance dissolves the function rather than improves it.

Terminus

Follow the peel: raw material of the reference → application → judgment → force → maintenance of µ itself. Last scarce term: authority to set the reference everyone is measured against—who writes legal µ. Same endpoint as intelligent economics’ peel to doxa. Contest turns inward. Holder at terminus is whatever maintains legal µ at scale—not a member added, but the checkpoint changed. Named at each step not “transfer” but “improvement.”

Whether trajectory reaches terminus is not this paper’s forecast. Recognition is: fixed sequence, ends at writing µ, entity writing µ holds what the kind held when the order was its own.

Next: the theorem—why better law may be less free.