Summary

Business has been dealing with semantic complexity for as long as there has been business. These issues are not trivial. Companies lose billions of dollars of market capitalization from the semantic exercise of reclassifying transactions that have already occurred. Lawyers earn billions of dollars creating agreements that make it difficult for the parties to understand to what they are agreeing. There are now more "trucks" sold every year than "cars" in the United States because calling a "car" a "truck" has all sorts of economic advantages.

Semantics is a big deal, whether or not we computerize our semantic notions. Until we computerize them, we still have humans at every step, performing myriad semantic interpretations and translations. However, some very strange things happen when we computerize our businesses, as we see in the next couple of chapters.