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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
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