An important book will be released at the end of next April by Routledge Academic Publishing, authored by two Australian anthropologists, Sarah Pink and Emma Quilty, titled: “Can We Trust Technology?”
This book addresses the contemporary crisis of trust, as people’s trust in organizations and emerging technologies is decreasing. With governments, industrial organizations, and research funders investing millions of dollars in efforts to design technologies that people trust, to what extent can we believe that those working in technology and research designers can produce trustworthy technologies? And is it realistic to assume that ordinary users of these technologies will truly trust them?
The book reevaluates prevailing assumptions about trust and advocates for a shift in thinking away from the allure of trustworthy technology and towards a vision of a reliable future. Through the chapters of this book, the researchers analyze trust as a preemptive infrastructure and a connecting thread, by questioning prevalent social methodologies and academic theories of trust, and studying how expert stakeholders and professionals in software-related fields and diverse project team members interact with trust, and exploring how trust emerges through its presence or absence in everyday life experiences and the possible future.
The first chapter, “The Trust Dilemma,” discusses how we live in a world where trust, in general, and trust in technology, in particular, has become an asset and a commodity, something all organizations want and aspire to “obtain” from ordinary people or “the public.” However, survey studies indicate that trust is “lost,” and existing methods to “recover” it seem ineffective. The researchers suggest rethinking trust, prioritizing care and inclusivity, rather than treating it as a type of transaction. By doing so, they emphasize the need to challenge the extractive approach to trust. Their perspective is that the currency of trust being traded in circles of power is likely not to possess the value attributed to it. And certainly, reimagining trust and what it means and supports in reality will also be beneficial to these organizations.
The second chapter poses the question of how those who claim to know about trust and technology understand trust and examines the concepts and theories used by anthropologists, science and technology studies researchers, computer scientists, and philosophers. Based on this, a practical theory of trust is proposed, relying on our concepts of preemptive infrastructure and connecting threads. Through a practical theory of trust, it can be mobilized to understand trust when and wherever it arises and to establish the principles necessary for generating trust. This is a new approach to trust, starting from the question of the conditions that might make people trust it, and how technology can be designed to suit those situations and needs. It is a response to the dilemma created by the methods that seek to make people trust existing technologies and organizations.
The third chapter delves into ethnographic research. Focusing on two studies based on interviews conducted online during the COVID-19 pandemic, both focused on trust and technology and required the formation of trustworthy positions in research during our use of technology in our research process. Interviews were conducted with two groups: the first group included individuals who discussed trust from leadership positions in legal, commercial, and academic fields, and the other group included professionals working in the software industry, who are involved in creating and using technologies that organizations hope to gain trust.
These two studies are related to discussions in the first and second chapters. They reveal the ways in which humans working in different fields of the technology industry deal with trust as part of their lives and work, and thus indicate that the criticisms and prevailing frameworks of trust are separate from the ways professionals deal with trust. The researchers suggest that we need to shift our attention to how trust issues actually work in professional practice, rather than focusing on grand ambitions and grand criticisms of trust in the abstract.
The fourth chapter extensively discusses how and why trust is an important concept in many fields and sectors, but it is often fragmented and disconnected. Through an ethnographic study of approaches to dealing with trust in a multidisciplinary research team, across design, social sciences, business, and computer science. Collaboration between different disciplines is one of the sites where we might transition from trust as a fragmented hope to trust as a connecting thread.
In the fifth chapter, the researchers expand on a series of ethnographic life situations that we face in the present and in the possible future, drawn from larger research projects, across fields of future autonomous mobility and technological transformations.
- How do people feel when they feel they can trust, and when they cannot?
- How do people imagine the possible future to be trustworthy?
By doing so, the researchers open the discussion for trust to become an embodied and tangible way of being, when experienced in the present, and for the trustworthy future to be imagined as possibilities for everyday life.
The researchers emphasize the importance of considering everyday trust as a means to counter visions that consider trust transactional, rational, and measurable. This means starting with the assumption that trust, when we encounter it ethnographically in our daily lives, is a feeling and a sensory, emotional, and physical state that distinguishes how we feel when we transition from the immediate present to the constantly emerging future. Trust is diversely connected to how we know or learn or hope or feel anxious or uncertain in certain circumstances, and how we relate to people and other species and things and our environments, and how we imagine and strive to achieve possibilities. And just as life itself intertwines with time, in ways that can be considered non-linear, we have learned from previous work that trust is not a stable state, and cannot be shaped or managed from above, through organizational strategies or technological design.
