Lautonomy has set out to map the world's rules because we think this relatively simple intervention helps unlock radically disruptive social and technological innovation. This latent disruptive potential is a function of why rules matter or, in other words, the role rules play in shaping and governing society. Distilled down there are four things rules do that matter (to us).

1/ Rules govern the world

First, rules are the artifacts used to govern, to manage societies. Rules govern the world.

Rules in this sense run the gamut from informal norms or codes of practice to formalized laws. Playing a football game involves understanding (and enforcing) a set of rules in just the same way as filling in required export control forms. Conceptually speaking, rules are the things that give actions or events their meaning. For example, there is no natural reason that three-of-kind beats a pair in poker; this win criteria is a function of the rules governing the game. Knowing what those rules of the game are is what allows us to say with confidence that the player who has three-of-a-kind wins IF the other player shows a pair.

By the same token, when a person claims that they have a right to asylum, they are referencing a set of agreed rules (or several sets of rules) that say IF that person has experienced or would be likely to experience certain things (like torture on return to their home country) this triggers a range of things a state has to do, including recognizing that person’s right to asylum by providing leave to remain.

It follows that if you aspire to know something about how the world works, you need to have a grasp of what the rules are and how they function. Another way to put this is that rules define system behavior (or behavior within a system). Every system you can imagine embodies a set of constitutional or foundational rules. These may be explicit or implicit, formally codified as law or policy or informally understood rules that shape winning versus losing strategies. The behaviors, preferences or agency exhibited within these systems is shaped (or amplified) by the authority and configuration of these rules.

2/ Rules impose costs

Second, rules create costs. Rules - particularly regulatory rules - impose administrative, reporting and compliance costs, raise business barriers to entry (e.g. affecting challenger’s ability to compete against incumbents), and impact profit margins.

Rules create friction for business and individuals, friction that can be quantified in the amount paid to lawyers and consultants, time spent gathering and collating required data, filling out and submitting forms. Complying with internal rules, policies and procedures, such as those involved in due diligence or managerial and technical reporting, also impose costs along similar lines. More broadly, researchers point to the intangible costs created by regulatory burdens such as anxiety generated by the threat of litigation, uncertainty, the pace of change and sense of inequity.

Part of the basic challenge of governance (at least in the liberal tradition) is to deliver the benefits of a rule-governed systems without the ancillary high - and growing - regulatory costs that undermine innovation, growth and human happiness.

3/ Rules protect and align values

Third, rules are how we protect things we - as individuals, societies and states - find valuable. Here we’re talking in particular about legal rules.

Many human rights claims, for example, are based on legal rules that act as a "trump card" against other types of claims. This setup reflects the preeminent importance liberal societies places on protecting individuals from particular types of harm (torture, targeted killing, imprisonment without trial, etc.). This protective function extends to how rules are used to govern exchanges of value, via contracts. (If rules define the world, contracts make the world go round.)

Another way to frame this is that the rules of law function to align the values of a pluralist society's competing stakeholders. That includes ensuring that things individuals and communities value - like freedom of speech, or clean air, or data privacy - are taken seriously by states and other authorities. This protects against a historical trend in which collective values like national security, or economic growth, are allowed to override individual goods.

The point is that the potential for systems to fail can be managed by entrenching rules and procedures for how clashes of value should be aligned and, if the rules are unclear, adjudicated.

4/ Rules shape and predict the future

Fourth, some rules have a constitutional character, in the sense that they define or determine future behavior (especially decision-making). Because rules have the power to shape system behavior they allow us to predict (and preempt) the future.

For example, as long as the rule that "cars must stop at a red light" persists, we can predict with a reasonable level of certainty that a driver, on arriving at a red light, will stop. What's more, the confidence we can have in this prediction doesn't radically vary with time; the rule-behavior relationship will hold true whether we're talking 2024 or 2084, because the prediction is mostly governed by the underlying strength of the norm rather than the temporal context in which the decision is made.

While the red light example may be seen as inconsequential, imagine we're talking about a different rule, say the obligation to pay taxes. If we know the rule is likely to persist into the far future and we can make a good guess as to population growth, we can begin to make highly confident predictions about the future tax base the governing authority will have access to and, crucially, be able to borrow against.

This constructive, future-defining role of rules also informs the arguments of prominent behavioral economists like Cass Sunstein (himself a constitutional legal theorist, among many other things) and Richard Thaler. So-called nudging and other rules-based systems interventions use regulatory rules as a particularly potent constraint (bind) on rationality precisely because its part of the nature of rules to shape decision making towards particular outcomes.

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The point to stress here is that mapping the world’s rules and building better models for how rules matter is not just an academic exercise. A better understanding of the world’s rules opens a pathway to more efficient forms of governance, value-aligned AI governance, better predictions about long-term futures, frictionless trade and more.