On 11 June, Dr Balázs Bodó will be speaking at the Asser Institute. During this research seminar, he will be presenting his paper: ‘Mediated trust: a theoretical framework to address the trustworthiness of technological trust mediators’.

Trust is what enables the cooperation of strangers in face of risks, contingencies, and potential harm. We are going through a global crisis of trust due to globalization and digitization. On the one hand, digital technologies contribute to this crisis through their destabilizing and disruptive effects. On the other hand, they offer new ways to produce trust. In either case, digital technologies permeate and transform almost every space where trust may emerge, is produced, and used. This creates new, often unknown types of risks and contingencies, which also require trust to be overcome.

We are entering an era where trust is technologically mediated, yet what little we know about the trustworthiness of trust mediating technologies gives us no reason to trust them.

We need trust technologies we can have confidence in. To achieve that goal, we need to understand the limitations of using purely technological ways of producing trust, and upgrade or change our existing institutional logics of trust production and distrust mitigation to incorporate technological trust mediators.

This talk outlines the current crisis of trust, the challenges technological modes of trust production generate, the nature of the institutional change, and the policies which can produce trustworthy technological trust mediators.

Source: T.M.C. Asser Instituut – Events