TY - JOUR
T1 - Digital social contracts
T2 - 1st International Forum on Digital and Democracy. Towards A Sustainable Evolution, IFDaD 2020
AU - Cardelli, Luca
AU - Orgad, Liav
AU - Shahaf, Gal
AU - Shapiro, Ehud
AU - Talmon, Nimrod
N1 - Funding Information:
Ehud Shapiro is the Incumbent of The Harry Weinrebe Professorial Chair of Computer Science and Biology. We thank the generous support of the Braginsky Center for the Interface between Science and the Humanities. Nimrod Talmon was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF; Grant No. 630/19).
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
PY - 2020/1/1
Y1 - 2020/1/1
N2 - Almost two centuries ago Pierre-Joseph Proudhon proposed social contracts - voluntary agreements among free people - as a foundation from which an egalitarian and just society can emerge. A digital social contract (DSC) is the novel incarnation of this concept for the digital age: a voluntary agreement between people that is specified, undertaken, and fulfilled in the digital realm. It embodies the notion of “code-is-law” in its purest form, in that a DSC is a program - code in a social contracts programming language, which specifies the digital actions parties to the social contract may take; and the parties to the contract are entrusted, equally, with the task of ensuring that each party abides by the contract. Parties to a social contract are identified via their public keys, and the one and only type of action a party to a DSC may take is a “digital speech act” - signing an utterance with her private key and sending it to the other parties to the contract. We present a formal definition of a DSC as agents that communicate asynchronously via digital speech acts, where the output of each agent is the input of all the other agents. We outline an abstract design for a social contracts programming language and hint on their applicability to social networks, sharing-economy, egalitarian currency networks, and democratic community governance.
AB - Almost two centuries ago Pierre-Joseph Proudhon proposed social contracts - voluntary agreements among free people - as a foundation from which an egalitarian and just society can emerge. A digital social contract (DSC) is the novel incarnation of this concept for the digital age: a voluntary agreement between people that is specified, undertaken, and fulfilled in the digital realm. It embodies the notion of “code-is-law” in its purest form, in that a DSC is a program - code in a social contracts programming language, which specifies the digital actions parties to the social contract may take; and the parties to the contract are entrusted, equally, with the task of ensuring that each party abides by the contract. Parties to a social contract are identified via their public keys, and the one and only type of action a party to a DSC may take is a “digital speech act” - signing an utterance with her private key and sending it to the other parties to the contract. We present a formal definition of a DSC as agents that communicate asynchronously via digital speech acts, where the output of each agent is the input of all the other agents. We outline an abstract design for a social contracts programming language and hint on their applicability to social networks, sharing-economy, egalitarian currency networks, and democratic community governance.
KW - Democratic Governance
KW - Programming Language Design
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85098158590&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference article
AN - SCOPUS:85098158590
SN - 1613-0073
VL - 2781
SP - 51
EP - 60
JO - CEUR Workshop Proceedings
JF - CEUR Workshop Proceedings
Y2 - 10 December 2020 through 11 December 2020
ER -