- 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
Colophon
The cover font is Gotham. The text font is Scala Pro Regular; the heading font is Benton Sans; and the code font is Dalton Maag’s Ubuntu Mono.
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