Effectively searching for effectiveness

Sat 20 December 2025, Philippe Ropenga Artificial intelligence Graphs

People who contact me are often frustrated because they feel that their actions or their values are being disregarded. They wish to be listened to and understood. They claim that they have a right to a thing that they have bought or done. They wish to challenge the right of someone else to a piece of computer code or to their home. Actions and values are not fully abstract; they become real as they are incorporated in a given thing, be it a product or a task that one has to complete. People may not realise that achieving a given result is not following a process but describing what is missing before matching something that exists with something that does not exist yet. As one moves from one stage to another, one applies one’s knowledge and one’s experience. A process is abstract since it has to be applied similarly in similar circumstances. Automation means that machines replace humans beings and a machine can only deal with abstraction because it does not know anything.¹.

Exercising a right to a thing takes more than making a claim. It requires to show who is related to a given piece of property and what one needs to enjoy it. One has to match a given person with a given thing that enables this person to use another thing in a given way. The thing in the middle of the line can be as simple as a key² but it has to connect the person to the house, for instance. Connections between things and people are dynamic and depend on attitudes to a thing that are not always easy to notice and change over time. This dynamic aspect is that of possession³. Describing these connections is powerful because it empowers a person to express a will and to enjoy freedom.⁴ Automation, processes, and compliance may seem comfortable because it is often easier to apply them than to understand one’s knowledge and to connect it to one’s needs. Processes tend to overshadow people.⁵

Many of you have been following me for many years now. You may ask yourself whether it is worth learning English trust law when one practice French trust law that is not used in French law. One may similarly wonder whether it is worth trying to connect nodes⁶ while spending time to distinguish major trends in the field of trusts and estates. I try to address similar issues from a graph perspective and to describe a legal situation using effective data structures.⁷. As John Jacob Niles put it, I wonder as I wander, and I believe that this is crucial as more and more tasks are being automated. Many thanks to lawyers and software developers for their support.

I wish you a Merry Christmas. I sincerely hope that you will be able to reconsider old paths to find new solutions to challenges in 2026.

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