Who Can You Trust?

October 1, 2017
How technology is changing our attitudes toward trust.At a time when trust in institutions--Congress, the church, the media, etc.--is in great jeopardy, another form of trust is quickly becoming the glue that keeps society together. It is called distributed trust, and it involves "people trusting other people through technology," writes business consultant Botsman (co-author: What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, 2010). Later in the book, she continues, "the rise of multi-billion-dollar companies such as Airbnb and Uber, whose success depends on trust between strangers, is a clear illustration of how trust can now travel through networks and marketplaces." In an absorbing, story-filled narrative that will leave readers with a new understanding of the phenomenon that drives life in our digital age, the author makes clear that distributed trust--a "confident relationship with the unknown"--now powers such disparate enterprises as Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites; social media platforms; peer-to-peer lending; online education courses; and Wikipedia and other information-sharing sites. In the case of self-driving cars, we now trust "our very lives to the unseen hand of technology." Examining trust and its various types (local, institutional, distributed), Botsman explains that we have been making "trust leaps" of one kind or another for centuries; a current example is entering credit card details into an internet site for the first time. She details the mechanisms that encourage the popularity of these transactions and the stories behind the success of such companies as Jack Ma's Alibaba, where 80 percent of all goods are bought and sold online in China, whose people demand proof of trustworthiness. Other sections cover trust and money, the risk of overtrusting robots, and the importance of reputation on the darknet. As the author notes, trust is "society's most precious and fragile asset," and we should all take a "trust pause" before deciding who to put faith in.A sharp, thoughtful, sometimes-surprising account of how we build trust with strangers now.

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November 1, 2017

Botsman (What's Mine Is Yours) expands upon her series of TED talks by examining technology's influence on trust. Included in this volume are several research studies and firsthand accounts that help illustrate how technology has evolved and whether it is considered trustworthy, with Airbnb and Uber as two examples of how photos and ratings systems influence consumer decision-making. These rating systems extend beyond housing, travel, and transportation; for example, they can help users decide on a babysitter solely based on others' online reviews. Botsman also explains what can happen when trust is misplaced, like when a well-rated Uber driver in Kalamazoo, MI, went on a killing spree or how a man wrecked his supposed self-driving car by watching a movie instead of watching the road. The writing is not overly technical, despite the talk of robots, the stock market, and various online platforms. VERDICT This is a book that every adult reader should pick up to gain some perspective on how reliant we have become on technology, and how we could afford to approach it with a little more skepticism.--Natalie Browning, LongwoodUniv. Lib., Farmville, VA

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