The English writer Percy Bysshe Shelley used to bang on about poets being “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” More recently, and more prosaically, the Harvard scholar Lawrence Lessig has argued that computer code is the new law. 

But computers, as well as humans, are now starting to write that code. Will that make algorithms the unacknowledged legislators of the world?

For the moment, the question is premature. But the rapid advances of OpenAI’s Codex code-writing program, released by the San Francisco-based research company over the summer, highlights the direction of travel. An offshoot of OpenAI’s powerful GPT-3 text generation model, Codex can instantly translate natural language into computer code in 12 different computer languages — and can even translate between them.