Most software earns its reputation by being helpful. It fills in what the user left out, corrects what they got wrong, remembers a summary so it can answer faster next time, and offers a view on what to do next. A machine keeping the record of a political maneuver has to give up nearly all of that, because each of those habits writes something into the record that the actor never said.
The Boundary of Computation argues where the machine stops: it cannot decide whether the target was persuaded, choose at a fork that cannot be undone, or attest that what a lever rested on has changed. Short of that line, The Lam System for Political Interaction lets a machine administer a maneuver and never execute it, and administering well has principles of its own, most of which look unhelpful from the outside.
Administering and executing
To execute a maneuver would be to move it forward on the machine's own reading: to decide that a meeting went well, that a lever's purpose had been met, that the next lever should be the one with the cheaper resource. To administer it is to keep the record, check every entry before it goes in, say what follows from what has been written, and replay any earlier moment on request.
The nearest human comparison is a good company secretary, who checks that a resolution is in order before it is minuted, can say what the articles allow the board to do next, and can produce the minutes of any past meeting exactly as they were written. The secretary does not vote. One who tidied the minutes afterward to match what the chair probably meant would leave the board unable to rely on any minute at all.
Illustrative. The people and the company are invented. Greta Solberg runs revenue management at a hotel group and wants the chief executive, Marcus Adeyemi, to move room pricing for every property onto one central desk under her. His adverse alternatives are to leave pricing with each hotel's general manager, or to buy it from an outside agency. Her levers are the results of a pricing pilot at three hotels, and a letter from the general managers of the two largest hotels saying they would welcome the change. A machine keeps her record.
Read, type, compare, move
Every entry is read the same way before the record accepts it. It is read as a string, to see whether it is an entry at all. Then it is typed, to see whether each part sits under something that can hold it and whether each act is credited to the party who performs it. Where it has to be matched against something already written, the two are compared. Last comes movement: whether any step of the maneuver allows the entry from where the maneuver now stands. What the System Is sets out the layers behind this order.
Because the order is fixed, the place where an entry stops says what kind of mistake it holds. A refusal at the reading is usually a slip of the pen, and a refusal at the types is more often a slip of thought. Greta, writing up a meeting in a hurry, records "we agreed on central pricing" as a selection under her own mark. The machine refuses it, because the selection is Marcus's. A correction would have hidden what the refusal shows her: in her own account she had started to treat his decision as a shared one.
A refusal at movement means the entry is well made and the maneuver has not reached the point where it can happen. Marcus decided at the meeting where Greta presented the pilot, before the general managers' letter went in. When she writes his selection, the machine refuses it, because a selection has to wait for each lever still in play, and the letter is one of them. What the machine can do is say which moves are open: set the letter aside as no longer needed, and the selection can then be written.
It does not set the letter aside itself. Mooting a lever cannot be undone, and whether the letter's purpose has already been served is Greta's to say. Perhaps Marcus decided provisionally and the letter would still matter when he told the general managers; only she was in the room. When no step will take an entry, nothing moves until the actor chooses.
Where does Greta's entry stop?
Illustrative. The people and the company are invented. The order in which the machine reads every entry Greta writes. Tick each check an entry passes, from the top: the first one left unticked is where it stops, and that place says what kind of mistake the entry holds. Her selection under her own mark stops at the second check, and Marcus's selection written before the letter is read stops at the third. Where an entry has to be matched against one already written, that comparison falls between the second check and the third, and it settles only whether the two name one thing.
Refuse, and never coerce
An entry the machine cannot read, type or move is refused, and the machine never bends it into something it can accept. Suppose Greta writes the outcome against "the alternative", with the dot that says there is only one, in a cycle that has two. A machine eager to help would pick the likelier one, probably the general managers, since the agency was never a serious threat. Even a right guess would put the machine's choice into the record under Greta's mark.
The larger damage falls on everything else in the record. Once a single entry has been improved, nobody reading the record later can tell which entries the actor wrote and which the machine repaired, so every entry becomes suspect, including the ones nobody touched. A visible error can be found and fixed, while a corrected one looks exactly like the actor's own work.
The system does read shorthand into one canonical form, which is a different act. A normalization applies a rule published in advance, gives the same result for every entry whatever it is about, and makes no choice among meanings, so a familiar abbreviation is never refused for being familiar and nobody needs to be asked about it. Coercion chooses what the writer probably meant, and the choice depends on what the entry says, which is why it always needs the actor's answer.
Say what refused
A refusal names the layer and the rule that stopped the entry. A bare "invalid" teaches the actor to rephrase until something gets through, and the entry that finally passes may say something other than what they meant. A named rule tells them what to fix.
It can also be argued with. The system's rules are tested against worked maneuvers, and a rule that forbids a step a maneuver plainly takes is at fault. An actor or adviser who can see which rule refused an entry can tell whether the entry was wrong or the rule was. The refusal itself belongs to the audit trail, kept with its reason, so a later reader can see what was refused and why.
The same openness applies when the machine treats two entries as one. When it finds that two lists of alternatives written in different orders say the same thing, it says which equivalence it used, so that a long comparison can be retraced by a person. It compares exactly what was written. A name is never swapped for its definition during a comparison, because expanding a name is an event of its own on the record, and a projection is never treated as the realization that answered it, even when the two agree.
Replay, never remember
Every question about the past is answered by replaying the record. In the fall, Greta asks what she expected Marcus to object to before the pilot results went in. The machine reads her projection as she wrote it in March, at its address, and neither her memory of it nor any summary plays a part. Asked what a cycle's interest said before a revision, the machine reads the earlier body, which the record kept at the same address. Asked what Marcus was choosing between before her first lever, it replays the record to that point, since the decision matrix is a reading of the record's history and has no stored copy to consult.
Remembering would be faster. A machine that kept a running note of where the maneuver stood, such as "Marcus is warming to central pricing", could answer questions without replaying anything. That note would be a second record, written by the machine in its own words, free to drift from the first, and holding a judgment about Marcus that nobody made. So everything the machine says about a maneuver's state has to be something it could derive from the record at the moment it says it. The record is the source of truth, and the machine's picture of the maneuver is only ever a reading of it. The Record gives the reasons one account of the past is worth more than two.
Rerun, and get the same answer
Every decision the machine makes can be rerun. Whether an entry reads, whether it types, whether two entries name the same thing, which moves are open: given the same record, each comes out the same every time, so a later replay can check any past decision by running it again on the same inputs.
The actor therefore does not have to trust the machine. An adviser, or a second machine, can replay Greta's record and reach the same holdings, the same open moves and the same refusals. If they disagree, the disagreement points to a particular entry and a particular rule, and one of them is wrong in a way that can be shown.
The actor's own entries cannot be rerun. Whether Marcus read the pilot as Greta projected is her appraisal, and the system's own position is that such appraisals are qualitative: two careful people can read the same target differently. The record therefore holds two kinds of entry side by side, those anyone can rerun and those only the actor could have written. The machine's first duty is to keep that division visible, and never to let an entry of the first kind stand in for one of the second.
Administering, or overstepping?
Illustrative. The people and the company are invented. Nine things a machine keeping Greta's record might do. Guess which are administering and which overstep, then select each to see why.
Select each item to see the verdict.
A published rule, the same for every entry whatever it is about. No meaning is chosen.
Selection is the target's act. The refusal names its rule, so Greta knows what to fix and can argue with the rule if it is wrong.
Coercion. Even a right guess puts the machine's choice into the record under Greta's mark.
What follows from the record: set the pending letter aside, and the selection can then be written.
Mooting cannot be undone, and whether the letter's purpose was served is Greta's to say.
A reading of Marcus. Only Greta can say whether his perception matched her projection.
A second record, in the machine's words, holding a judgment nobody made.
The matrix is a reading of the record's history. Replaying to that point is the only way to see it.
An overwrite. The projection has to stay beside the selection, or her forecast can never be checked.
- Administering
- 4 of 9
- Overstepping
- 5 of 9
In the illustrative sorting above, four of the nine things a machine might do with Greta's record are administering and five overstep. Each of the five would look like help, and each would leave Greta with a record partly written by something other than her.
What the actor gets
A well-administered maneuver leaves a record that is narrow and exact. Every entry in it is either something the actor judged or something that follows from what the actor judged, and the line between the two is marked. When Greta goes back over the maneuver with an adviser, she can show the selection the machine refused in March, the letter she set aside and her reason, and her projection of Marcus beside what he chose, each replayed to the entry. Whether the letter would have mattered is not in the record, and the machine has no way to put it there.