nor think that idea can solve miscoordination in the abstract (only, possibly, be a nice pragmatic way to bootstrap coordination from agents who are already sufficiently nice).
The central question to my mind is principles of establishing coordination between different situations/agents, and contracts is a framing for what coordination might look like once established. Agentic contracts have the additional benefit of maintaining coordination across their instances once it’s established initially. Coordination theory should clarify how agents should think about establishing coordination with each other, how they should construct these contracts.
This is not about niceness/cooperation. For example I think it should be possible to understand a transformer as being in coordination with the world through patterns in the world and circuits in the transformer, so that coordination gets established through learning. Beliefs are contracts between a mind and its object of study, essential tools the mind has for controlling it. Consequentialist control is a special case of coordination in this sense, and I think one problem with decision theories is that they are usually overly concerned with remaining close to consequentialist framing.
The central question to my mind is principles of establishing coordination between different situations/agents, and contracts is a framing for what coordination might look like once established. Agentic contracts have the additional benefit of maintaining coordination across their instances once it’s established initially. Coordination theory should clarify how agents should think about establishing coordination with each other, how they should construct these contracts.
This is not about niceness/cooperation. For example I think it should be possible to understand a transformer as being in coordination with the world through patterns in the world and circuits in the transformer, so that coordination gets established through learning. Beliefs are contracts between a mind and its object of study, essential tools the mind has for controlling it. Consequentialist control is a special case of coordination in this sense, and I think one problem with decision theories is that they are usually overly concerned with remaining close to consequentialist framing.