Trust is probably the most valuable human quality. Everything we do is preceded by a mostly subconscious evaluation of the trustworthiness of what we’re interacting with. Will it help me achieve my goals?
When we walk over a floor, we trust that we won’t fall through, when we buy groceries, we trust that it won’t poison us, when we meet a friend, we trust that they won’t harm us. Trust help us navigate in the world without having to always measure that the structure holds or that the bond between molecules and atoms don’t betray us or that a stranger won’t kill us. Without trust we stop to function. Yet somehow, trust doesn’t seem to be much appreciated in our modern world.
The downside with trust is that it is easily exploitable. Trust can be exploited for profit and it is easy to sow uncertainty to gain competitive advantage. Although this may make some people wealthy or powerful, both leads to loss of value for the wider system.
When we can’t trust the information we get about the world around us, the only thing that is certain is that we base our decisions on false premises. With the advent of generative ai, making false descriptions of the world is easier than ever and we may enter an era where truth looses all meaning. Technology may also help us to better evaluate trustworthiness, and it will probably be much better at it than us humans. But it will require that we face up to our relationship with truth in our societies.
When working with patterns for evaluating trustworthiness it quickly becomes clear that there is very little, for example in media or coming out of politicians mouths, that are very trustworthy. And that goes for everyone around globe, not just our adversaries. If we want to survive and thrive as a species we must address this. That will be very painful, because when we develop tools to help us see through misinformation, there are a lot of business models that will stop working.
There is most certainly no perfect way to achieve full trustworthiness but we can do so much better than we’re doing now.
We believe we can help and we would like to start with giving all individuals the digital means to be treated as of equal value and born free. If we can’t do that we have no reason to trust each other.
Trust is not gullible, it’s a requirement for civilisation.