Cooperation among humans is an essential part of civilization. The scale of that cooperation sets the ceiling on what a society can achieve, particularly in scientific and moral progress. We define governance as the set of rules that enable humans to cooperate at scale in an environment with limited shared resources — land, commodities, and energy. These rules are also known as the “social contract.”
We claim that large-scale cooperation was always possible in theory. The practical limit was never human nature but information and enforcement — cooperation requires that actions be observed (Nowak, “Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation,” 2006), and it scales only as far as monitoring and sanctions are cheap and credible (Ostrom, Governing the Commons, 1990). In other words, where monitoring is costly, imperfect, or capturable, cooperation stays limited or detrimented.
Smart social contracts are governance rules encoded as software and executed verifiably, tamper-proof and efficiently. Thus, the coordination problem becomes a software problem allowing human coordination at scale become unbounded.
Particularly for cheating strategies, smart social contracts make defection too expensive to be worth attempting and cooperation the most individually beneficial choice, becoming an equilibrium (Folk Theorem: Friedman, “A Non-cooperative Equilibrium for Supergames,” 1971; Fudenberg & Maskin, “The Folk Theorem in Repeated Games with Discounting or with Incomplete Information,” 1986; confirmed experimentally in Fehr & Gächter, “Altruistic Punishment in Humans,” 2002).
Running smart social contracts across societies requires a shared layer for resource management, standardization, and modular composition of social rules. The analogy in software is an operating system. A Governance Operating System (GOS) guarantees the execution of smart social contracts at civilizational level. The underlying technological substrate was missing until the recent advent of blockchain technology, and particularly the Internet Computer Protocol (ICP). A running implementation of a GOS on ICP is Realms — visit realmsgos.org.