Published in:
15-11-2017
Trusting Digital Technologies Correctly
Author:
Mariarosaria Taddeo
Published in:
Minds and Machines
|
Issue 4/2017
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Excerpt
Trust is a facilitator of interactions among the members of a system, whether these be human agents, artificial agents or a combination of both (a hybrid system). Elsewhere, I have argued that the occurrences of trust are related to, and affect, pre-existing relations, like purchasing, negotiation, communication, and delegation (Taddeo
2010a,
b). Trust is not to be considered a relation itself but a
property of relations, something that changes the way relations occur. Consider, for example, a case of communication. Alice talks to Bob and she informs him that the grocery store down the road is closed for the day As Bob trusts Alice, he believes her and decides not to walk to the shop to double check, instead he starts searching for an alternative place to shop for his groceries. Between Alice and Bob there is a
first-
order relation, the communication, which ranges over the two agents, and there is the
second-
order property of trust that ranges over the first-order-relation and affects the way it occurs. …