Volition Elicitation: Operational Semantics for People and Their Machines

The most prevalent distributed systems today include people and their personal machines (smartphones). In such systems, computations are driven by people's volitions: a payment when a person wishes to pay someone, befriending when two people wish to become friends, etc. Volition-Guarded Multiagent Atomic Transactions were proposed as an abstract specification language for such systems, in which each agent consists of a person and their machine, and a transaction can be guarded by both the machine states and the personal volitions of its participating agents. Here, we define the programming language volition-guarded GLP (vGLP), which extends GLP with volition-guarded clauses, and define its operational semantics as an instance of Communicating Volitional Agents. As the semantics requires the person to will a volition-guarded clause reduction, a correct implementation must elicit the person's volitions: finding out ``what's in the person's head'' is the sole rationale for the UI, which is realised accordingly by standard constructs. We demonstrate the approach on the grassroots social graph, social network, and currencies: each platform is a vGLP program, generated by AI from volition-guarded multiagent atomic transactions; the implementation of vGLP, also created by AI, then maps its volition-guarded clauses into the user-interface constructs, resulting in a single working app deployed on a physical smartphone.

Constitutional Governance in Metric Spaces

Computational social choice and algorithmic decision theory offer rich aggregation theory but no comprehensive process for egalitarian self-governance: aggregation, deliberation, amendment, and consensus are each considered in isolation, with key metric-space aggregators being NP-hard. Here, we propose constitutional governance in metric spaces, integrating these stages into a coherent polynomial-time protocol for constitutional governance. The constitution assigns, per amendable component including itself, a metric space, aggregation rule, and supermajority threshold. Amendments proceed by members voting with their ideal elements, followed by members submitting public proposals carrying supermajority public support under the revealed votes. Public proposals can be sourced from deliberation among members, vote aggregation, or AI mediation. The constitutional rule adopts a supported proposal with positive maximal score, if there is one, else retains the status quo. With Constitutional Consensus, a community can run the constitutional governance protocol on members' personal computing devices (e.g., smartphones), achieving digital sovereignty. We focus on the utility of the generalised median, prove that at majority threshold no misreport weakly dominates sincere voting, and study the compromise gap between best peak and unconstrained optimum. We instantiate the framework to seven canonical settings -- electing officers, setting rates, allocating budgets, ranking priorities, selecting boards, drafting bylaws, and amending the constitution. By unifying metric-space aggregation, reality-aware social choice, supermajority amendment, constitutional consensus, deliberative coalition formation, and AI mediation, this work delivers a comprehensive solution to the constitutional governance of digital communities and organisations.

Implementing Grassroots Logic Programs with Multiagent Transition Systems and AI

Grassroots Logic Programs (GLP) is a concurrent logic programming language with variables partitioned into paired \emph{readers} and \emph{writers}, conjuring both linear logic and futures/promises: an assignment is produced at most once via the sole occurrence of a writer (promise) and consumed at most once via the sole occurrence of its paired reader (future), and may contain additional readers and/or writers, enabling the concise expression of rich multidirectional communication modalities. GLP was designed as a language for grassroots platforms -- distributed systems with multiple instances that can operate independently of each other and of any global resource, and can coalesce into ever larger instances -- with its target architecture being smartphones communicating peer-to-peer. The operational semantics of Concurrent (single-agent) GLP and of multiagent GLP (maGLP) were defined via transition systems/multiagent transition systems, respectively. Here, we describe the mathematics developed to facilitate the workstation- and smartphone-based implementations of GLP by AI in Dart. We developed dGLP -- implementation-ready deterministic operational semantics for single-agent GLP -- and proved it correct with respect to the Concurrent GLP operational semantics; dGLP was used by AI as a formal spec, from which it developed a workstation-based implementation of GLP. We developed madGLP -- an implementation-ready multiagent operational semantics for maGLP -- and proved it correct with respect to the maGLP operational semantics; madGLP is deterministic at the agent level (not at the system level due to communication asynchrony), and is being used by AI as a formal spec from which it develops a smartphone-based implementation of maGLP.

AI-Generated Compromises for Coalition Formation

The challenge of finding compromises between agent proposals is fundamental to AI subfields such as argumentation, mediation, and negotiation. Building on this tradition, Elkind et al. (2021) introduced a process for coalition formation that seeks majority-supported proposals preferable to the status quo, using a metric space where each agent has an ideal point. A crucial step in this process involves identifying compromise proposals around which agent coalitions can unite. How to effectively find such compromise proposals remains an open question. We address this gap by formalizing a model that incorporates agent bounded rationality and uncertainty, and by developing AI methods to generate compromise proposals. We focus on the domain of collaborative document writing, such as the democratic drafting of a community constitution. Our approach uses natural language processing techniques and large language models to induce a semantic metric space over text. Based on this space, we design algorithms to suggest compromise points likely to receive broad support. To evaluate our methods, we simulate coalition formation processes and show that AI can facilitate large-scale democratic text editing, a domain where traditional tools are limited.

Foundations for Grassroots Democratic Metaverse

While the physical lives of many of us are in democracies (one person, one vote - e.g., the EU and the US), our digital lives are mostly in autocracies (one person, all votes - e.g., Facebook). Cryptocurrencies promise liberation but stop short, at plutocracy (one coin, one vote). What would it take for us to live our digital lives in a digital democracy? This paper offers a vision, a theoretical framework, and an architecture for a grassroots network of autonomous, people-owned, people-operated, and people-governed digital communities, namely a grassroots democratic metaverse. It also charts a roadmap towards realizing it, and identifies unexplored territory for further research.