Can We Trust Technology?

This book examines the contemporary crisis of trust, where people’s trust in organisations and in emerging technologies is decreasing. It reconsiders dominant assumptions about trust, arguing for a shift in thinking away from motifs of trustable technology and toward motifs of trustable futures.

As emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence, automated, and robotic technologies become increasingly prominent in our possible futures, there is growing anxiety about if they can be trusted. Governments, industry organisations and research funders are investing millions in the quest to design trustworthy technologies. But is a future where trusted technologies organise our lives for us even plausible? How do tech workers and researchers design or make technologies that we can trust? Is it even realistic to assume that people would trust technologies in everyday life? This book argues that we need to look beyond simplistic assumptions that trustworthy technologies will solve society’s problems, to instead ask what would happen if we exchanged the motif of trustworthy technologies for one of trusted futures guided by people, the environment and other species. This will be the first book to advance a new argument and research agenda in this field, and is therefore designed to be a key reference point in forthcoming literature and debates regarding trust, technology and futures. By taking an approach rooted in anthropology but attentive to and drawing on an interdisciplinary field, Trust, Technology and Futures is a short, accessible and incisive intervention, which offers a new vision for trusted futures which should generate broad interest and appeal.