Enabling the Organic Economy
I left off last time without fully fleshing out some of these contract programming ideas, and I haven’t yet touched on why this approach is fresh and worth pursuing. I hope to outline my premises and justify my proposal in this post.
Provided as a trusted, third party service akin to PayPal, a contract program and execution service would lower costs and risks of creating and managing complex contracts and transactions. The contract code is viewable to both parties, the logic is clear and easy to learn, and the underlying mechanics of how the code runs would be documented and potentially even open for review. With contracts created and executed deterministically, room for creative, litigious human interpretation is minimized.
In the near future, such a service will substantially lower or eliminate costs of complex digital transactions and collaborations, enhancing fluidity in the market, and thereby helping small businesses and individual contractors to more easily do business. Even more intriguing are the long term possibilities. Increasingly complex and sophisticated contracts could be constructed out of predictable existing contracts, similar to importing existing libraries into a program. Full blown contract systems will emerge.
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April 19th, 2006 at 11:02 pm
[...] While I’m still dabbling with rigid bodies and accidental surrealist physics, working through semantic web and constraint propagation in 6.891, and discovering my inner dynamist/libertarian in CMS, now I’ll also be adding a revisit to social and economic contracts. I hope to (a) examine patterns of informal social contracts, and (b) construct a demonstration system that acts as executor of a coded contract. [...]