Promise Theory - Autonomy

Autonomy

Obligations, rather than promises have been the traditional way of guiding behaviour. Promise Theory's point of departure from obligation logics is the idea that all agents in a system should have autonomy of control—i.e. that they cannot be coerced or forced into a specific behaviour. Obligation theories in computer science often view an obligation as a deterministic command that causes its proposed outcome. In Promise Theory an agent may only make promises about its own behaviour. For autonomous agents it is meaningless to make promises about another's behaviour.

Although this assumption could be interpreted morally or ethically, in Promise Theory this is simply a pragmatic `engineering' principle, which leads to a more complete documentation of the intended roles of the actors or agents within the whole. The reason for this is that, when one is not allowed to make assumptions about others' behaviour, one is forced to document every promise more completely in order to make predictions; thus it leads to a more complete documentation which in turn points out the possible failure modes by which cooperative behaviour could fail.

Command and control systems like those that motivate obligation theories can easily be reproduced by having agents voluntarily promise to follow the instructions of another agent (this is also viewed as a more realistic model of behaviour). Since a promise can always be withdrawn, there is no contradiction between voluntary cooperation and command and control.

In Philosophy and Law a promise is often viewed as something that leads to an obligation. Promise Theory rejects that point of view. Bergstra and Burgess have shown that the concept of a promise is quite independent of that of obligation and indeed is simpler.

The role of obligations in increasing certainty is unclear, since obligations can come from anywhere and an aggregation of non-local constraints cannot be resolved by a local agent: this means that obligations can actually increase uncertainty. In a world of promises, all constraints on an agent are self-imposed and local (even if they are suggested by outside agents), thus all contradictions can be resolved locally.