93. Realization and abstraction

There is a difference between a collection of machines that cooperate and a collection that acquires a social organization. Cooperation may last for one exchange. An organization can retain a record of what happened, assign responsibilities, determine which actions are permitted, settle conflicting claims, and preserve its operating procedures as participants change. If the latter arrangement is maintained by multiple decision centers and if its rules have consequences for their behavior, the idea of a machine society becomes a coherent subject for theoretical computer science rather than a speculative metaphor.