Thinking in Promises by Burgess, Mark -- Read -- Imperial Library of Trantor

Index

Foreword Letter to the Reader 1. Promises and Impositions

Promise Engineering From Commands to Promises Why Is a Promise Better than a Command? Autonomy Leads to Greater Certainty The Observer Is Always Right Culture and Psychology Nonlocality of Obligations Isn’t That Quasi-Science? Is Promise Theory Really a Theory? The Main Concepts How Much Certainty Do You Need? A Quick User Guide Just Make It Happen An Exercise

2. With a License to Intend

An Imposition Too Far Reformulating Your World into Promises Proxies for Human Agency What Are the Agencies of Promises? What Issues Do We Make Promises About? What Things Can Be Promised? What Things Can’t Be Promised? The Lifecycle of Promises Keeping Promises Cooperation: The Polarity of Give and Take How Much Does a Promise Binding Count? Promises and Trust Are Symbiotic Promoting Certainty Some Exercises

3. Assessing Promises

What We Mean by Assessment Kinds of Promise Assessment Relativity: Many Worlds, Branches, and Their Observers Relativity and Levels of Perception Inferred Promises: Emergent Behaviour How Promises Define Agent-Perceived Roles The Economics of Promise Value: Beneficial Outcomes Human Reliability The Eye of the Beholder Some Exercises

4. Conditional Promises—and Deceptions

The Laws of Conditional Promising Local Quenching of Conditionals Assisted Promises Conditional Causation and Dependencies Circular Conditional Bindings: The Deadlock Carousel The Curse of Conditions, Safety Valves Other Circular Promises Logic and Reasoning: The Limitations of Branching and Linear Thinking Some Exercises

5. Engineering Cooperation

Engineering Autonomous Agents Promisees, Stakeholders, and Trading Promises Broken Promises What Are the Prerequisites for Cooperation? Who Is Responsible for Keeping Promises? Mutual Bindings and Equilibrium of Agreement Incompatible Promises: Conflicts of Intent Cooperating for Availability and the Redundancy Conundrum Agreement as Promises: Consensus of Intent Contractual Agreement Contracts and Signing Agreement in Groups Promoting Cooperation by Incentive: Beneficial Outcome The Stability of Cooperation: What Axelrod Said The Need to Be Needed: Reinterpreting an Innate Incentive? Avoiding Conflicts of Interest Emergent Phenomena as Collective Equilibria: Forming Superagents Guiding the Outcome of Cooperation When It Is Emergent Stability of Intent: Erratic Behaviour? When Being Not of One Mind Is an Advantage Human Error or Misplaced Intent? Organization: Centralization Versus Decentralization Focused Interventions or Sweeping Policies? Societies and Functional Roles Relationships: What Dunbar Said Some Exercises

6. Engineering Component Systems

Reasoning with Cause Componentization: Divide and Build! What Do We Mean by Components? What Systemic Promises Should Components Keep? Can Agents Themselves Have Components? (Superagents) Component Design and Roles Components Need to Be Assembled Fragile Promises in Component Design Reusability of Components Interchangeability of Components Compatibility of Components Backward Compatibility Upgrading and Regression Testing of Components Designing Promises for a Market Law of the Lowest Common Denominator Imposing Requirements: False Expectations Component Choices That You Can’t Go Back On The Art of Versioning Names and Identifiers for “Branding” Component Promises Naming Promisee Usage (-) Rather than Function (+) The Cost of Modularity Some Exercises

7. Service Engineering

The Client-Server Model Responsibility for Service Delivery Dispatchers and Queues for Service on Demand Delivering Service Through Intermediaries or Proxies Framing Promises as State or Action Delivery Chains by Imposition Delivery Chains with Promises Formality Helps the Medicine Go Down Chains of Intermediaries End-to-End Integrity Transformation Chains or Assembly Lines Continuity of Delivery and Intent The Versioning Problem Again Avoiding Conflicting Promises by Branching into Separate Worlds Avoiding Many Worlds’ Branches by Converging on Target Backwards Compatibility Means Continuity of Intent Assessing a Service by Promising to Use It (Testing) Some Exercises

8. Knowledge and Information

How Information Becomes Knowledge Knowledge: The Mystery Cat Passing Information Around Categories Are Roles Made into Many World Branches Superagent Aggregation (Expialidocious) Thinking in Straight Lines Knowledge Engineering Equilibrium and Common Knowledge Integrity of Information Through Intermediaries Relativity of Information Promising Consistency Across Multiple Agents and CAP A Is for Availability C Is for Consistency P Is for Partition Tolerance The World Is My Database, I Shall Not Want Some Exercises

9. Systemic Promises

What Is a System? The Myth of System and User Systemic Promises Who Intends Systemic Promises? Breaking Down the Systemic Promises for Real Agencies Why Do Systems Succeed or Fail in Keeping Promises? Complexity, Separation, and Modularity The Collapse of Complex Systems Through the Lens of Promises

Index