User forgiveness has its limits. As the iPhone battery scandal proved, when Apple is not upfront with customers, suspicion starts to brew. Apple will need to crack open the “black boxes”, to lift the veil on the products with which we interact daily and yet know very little about – and may trust too much.
Once seen as saviours of democracy, tech giants are now viewed as threats to truth. But how did our faith in all things digital turn into an erosion of trust, particularly in the arena of information and politics?
For decades, we’ve turned to institutions to vouch for people we don’t know – Rachel Botsman explores how the blockchain will change everything.
In this extract from “Who Can You Trust?” Rachel charts the importance and success of user reviews – even on the darknet, reputation is everything.
What coaxes us into trying something new for the first time? Rachel explains the process that enables people to trust sharing a ride with a stranger, staying in the home of someone you don’t know or getting into a self-driving car.
By 2030, we’ll see credit scoring expanding into ‘life scoring’. Identity and reputation will be digitised and analysed in minute detail, shaping a future where a personal ‘trust score’ will be the norm, with all the benefits and drawbacks that might bring.
Gaining the right amount of trust is the major impediment for autonomous cars – the overlooked challenge is not whether people will step into cars in the first place, but how do you prevent people from trusting too quickly and too easily?
The Chinese government plans to launch its Social Credit System in 2020. The aim? To judge the trustworthiness – or otherwise – of its 1.3 billion residents.
Faced with a choice of babysitters, which do you rely on: your instinct – or the algorithm that tells you to book the one in the green top?
In this essay adapted from “Who Can You Trust?”, Rachel introduces a bot, “Alexa”, to her daughter to understand how quickly we trust robots and why should we train our children to not trust so easily.
As a part of WIRED World 2016, Rachel delves into how crumbling institutional systems are giving way to technology-engineered decentralized trust that flows directly between people.
Rachel unpacks the revolutionary shift occurring from trust in institutions to individuals, greasing the wheels of business, facilitating person-to-person relationships and changing the ‘real world’ behavior of people.