The commodification of trust

The internet and digital technologies created a new category of trust producers. Online reputation management services (such as Uber or Airbnb), distributed ledgers, and AI-based predictive systems offer familiarity, control, and insurance by structuring social, economic interactions via technical systems. Balázs Bodó writes that even though these infrastructures are widely used within public and private institutions, we have no reason to trust them. He argues that we must increase the trustworthiness of technological trust infrastructures — and stop using them if that is not possible — lest commodified forms of trust endanger the social and economic relations that they mediate.

 
The ongoing COVID crisis has brought to the forefront the complex trust relationships between citizens, public and private institutions, and various digital technologies. Can I trust a face mask to protect me from infection? Should I trust the person (not) wearing a mask? Should I trust the pandemic-related advice of governments and scientists? Can we, as a society, trust the brand-new mRNA vaccine technology? Is a traditional vaccine technology more or less trustworthy, if it is coming from an authoritarian regime such as Russia and China? Can I trust my government or the European specialised agencies (such as the European Medicines Agency) to correctly assess the health risks associated with different vaccine technologies, and not succumb to economic or political pressures?

Can the government trust its citizens to voluntarily follow non-mandatory quarantine advice? Can a government be trusted with running contact tracing and vaccination passport schemes? Do employers trust their workforce to work from home, or do they prescribe the use of monitoring technologies? Can we trust our teleconferencing infrastructure, so they work reliably, and protect our privacy? Can we have confidence in the third-party teaching materials and e-learning environments that schools are now forced to use to teach and assess our children? And, as the case of the UK government’s debacle with their grading AI suggests, when these systems are misfiring, how does that affect trust in the government?

Trust is the strategy humans employ to cross the bridge of uncertainty in their social, economic relations, so they can live with, rely on, or cooperate with each other in the face of risks, contingencies, and potential harm.

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Πηγή: blogs.lse.ac.uk