Thinking in Promises

Table of contents

1. Foreword
2. Letter to the Reader
3. 1. Promises and Impositions
   1. Promise Engineering
   2. From Commands to Promises
   3. Why Is a Promise Better than a Command?
   4. Autonomy Leads to Greater Certainty
   5. The Observer Is Always Right
   6. Culture and Psychology
   7. Nonlocality of Obligations
   8. Isn’t That Quasi-Science?
   9. Is Promise Theory Really a Theory?
   10. The Main Concepts
   11. How Much Certainty Do You Need?
   12. A Quick User Guide
   13. Just Make It Happen
   14. An Exercise
4. 2. With a License to Intend
   1. An Imposition Too Far
   2. Reformulating Your World into Promises
   3. Proxies for Human Agency
   4. What Are the Agencies of Promises?
   5. What Issues Do We Make Promises About?
   6. What Things Can Be Promised?
   7. What Things Can’t Be Promised?
   8. The Lifecycle of Promises
   9. Keeping Promises
   10. Cooperation: The Polarity of Give and Take
   11. How Much Does a Promise Binding Count?
   12. Promises and Trust Are Symbiotic
   13. Promoting Certainty
   14. Some Exercises
5. 3. Assessing Promises
   1. What We Mean by Assessment
   2. Kinds of Promise Assessment
   3. Relativity: Many Worlds, Branches, and Their Observers
   4. Relativity and Levels of Perception
   5. Inferred Promises: Emergent Behaviour
   6. How Promises Define Agent-Perceived Roles
   7. The Economics of Promise Value: Beneficial Outcomes
   8. Human Reliability
   9. The Eye of the Beholder
   10. Some Exercises
6. 4. Conditional Promises—and Deceptions
   1. The Laws of Conditional Promising
   2. Local Quenching of Conditionals
   3. Assisted Promises
   4. Conditional Causation and Dependencies
   5. Circular Conditional Bindings: The Deadlock Carousel
   6. The Curse of Conditions, Safety Valves
   7. Other Circular Promises
   8. Logic and Reasoning: The Limitations of Branching and Linear Thinking
   9. Some Exercises
7. 5. Engineering Cooperation
   1. Engineering Autonomous Agents
   2. Promisees, Stakeholders, and Trading Promises
   3. Broken Promises
   4. What Are the Prerequisites for Cooperation?
   5. Who Is Responsible for Keeping Promises?
   6. Mutual Bindings and Equilibrium of Agreement
   7. Incompatible Promises: Conflicts of Intent
   8. Cooperating for Availability and the Redundancy Conundrum
   9. Agreement as Promises: Consensus of Intent
   10. Contractual Agreement
   11. Contracts and Signing
   12. Agreement in Groups
   13. Promoting Cooperation by Incentive: Beneficial Outcome
   14. The Stability of Cooperation: What Axelrod Said
   15. The Need to Be Needed: Reinterpreting an Innate Incentive?
   16. Avoiding Conflicts of Interest
   17. Emergent Phenomena as Collective Equilibria: Forming Superagents
   18. Guiding the Outcome of Cooperation When It Is Emergent
   19. Stability of Intent: Erratic Behaviour?
   20. When Being Not of One Mind Is an Advantage
   21. Human Error or Misplaced Intent?
   22. Organization: Centralization Versus Decentralization
   23. Focused Interventions or Sweeping Policies?
   24. Societies and Functional Roles
   25. Relationships: What Dunbar Said
   26. Some Exercises
8. 6. Engineering Component Systems
   1. Reasoning with Cause
   2. Componentization: Divide and Build!
   3. What Do We Mean by Components?
   4. What Systemic Promises Should Components Keep?
   5. Can Agents Themselves Have Components? (Superagents)
   6. Component Design and Roles
   7. Components Need to Be Assembled
   8. Fragile Promises in Component Design
   9. Reusability of Components
   10. Interchangeability of Components
   11. Compatibility of Components
   12. Backward Compatibility
   13. Upgrading and Regression Testing of Components
   14. Designing Promises for a Market
   15. Law of the Lowest Common Denominator
   16. Imposing Requirements: False Expectations
   17. Component Choices That You Can’t Go Back On
   18. The Art of Versioning
   19. Names and Identifiers for “Branding” Component Promises
   20. Naming Promisee Usage (-) Rather than Function (+)
   21. The Cost of Modularity
   22. Some Exercises
9. 7. Service Engineering
   1. The Client-Server Model
   2. Responsibility for Service Delivery
   3. Dispatchers and Queues for Service on Demand
   4. Delivering Service Through Intermediaries or Proxies
   5. Framing Promises as State or Action
   6. Delivery Chains by Imposition
   7. Delivery Chains with Promises
   8. Formality Helps the Medicine Go Down
   9. Chains of Intermediaries
   10. End-to-End Integrity
   11. Transformation Chains or Assembly Lines
   12. Continuity of Delivery and Intent
   13. The Versioning Problem Again
   14. Avoiding Conflicting Promises by Branching into Separate Worlds
   15. Avoiding Many Worlds’ Branches by Converging on Target
   16. Backwards Compatibility Means Continuity of Intent
   17. Assessing a Service by Promising to Use It (Testing)
   18. Some Exercises
10. 8. Knowledge and Information
    1. How Information Becomes Knowledge
    2. Knowledge: The Mystery Cat
    3. Passing Information Around
    4. Categories Are Roles Made into Many World Branches
    5. Superagent Aggregation (Expialidocious)
    6. Thinking in Straight Lines
    7. Knowledge Engineering
    8. Equilibrium and Common Knowledge
    9. Integrity of Information Through Intermediaries
    10. Relativity of Information
    11. Promising Consistency Across Multiple Agents and CAP
    12. A Is for Availability
    13. C Is for Consistency
    14. P Is for Partition Tolerance
    15. The World Is My Database, I Shall Not Want
    16. Some Exercises
11. 9. Systemic Promises
    1. What Is a System?
    2. The Myth of System and User
    3. Systemic Promises
    4. Who Intends Systemic Promises?
    5. Breaking Down the Systemic Promises for Real Agencies
    6. Why Do Systems Succeed or Fail in Keeping Promises?
    7. Complexity, Separation, and Modularity
    8. The Collapse of Complex Systems
    9. Through the Lens of Promises
12. Index