The Agents of a FAIR Research Platform

To explain a FAIR research platform, we have to show how they are built from mindless stuff, smaller and simpler than anything we’d consider smart. What could these simpler particles be – the “agents” that compose the platform? There are many questions to answer:

• Function: How do agents work?
• Embodiment: What are they made of?
• Interaction: How do they communicate?
• Learning: How do we make new agents and change old ones?
• Character: What are the most important kinds of agents?
• Authority: What happens when agents disagree?
• Intention: How could such networks want or wish?
• Competence: How can groups of agents do what separate agents cannot do?
• Selfness: What gives them unity or personality?
• Meaning: How could they understand anything?

These questions all seem difficult when we sever each one’s connections to the other ones. But once we see a platform as a society of agents, each answer can illuminate the rest.