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.