Last time, I wrote about the implications of automated online trust. So what are some of the biggest ways the world will change if we can automate online trust?
A qualifier: If we could create online trust 100%, with no false negative (I mistrust someone when I shouldn’t) and no false positive (I fail to trust someone I should), it would exceed what we have in the real world. We could use it as the ultimate lie detector. But, even though this is a thought experiment, I’ll keep this within bounds. Let’s just equate online trust with the equivalent in the offline world. (This will also save me from knotty philosophical problems around the definition of “truth.”)
Trust here means that I accept:
1. The person making a statement has sufficient knowledge and capability, and
2. The person has my best interests at heart.
In the most extreme case, the person leading me up to the peak of Everest has done it before, seems to have all the needed equipment, and speaks knowledgably about weather, ice, and terrain. Also, they have not led clients off cliffs or left them behind to freeze.
When the situation is less extreme, say they want to sell me a ticket to a concert, my trust requirements will be less. The more risk, the more trust I’ll need. So what are the five biggest ways the world will change if we can automate online trust?
Wealth Management – This is touch-and-go in any circumstances. Think of the famous, intelligent people who have been taken in by money managers they knew well and trusted almost without limit. (In the U.S., the list of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme victims alone creates a list that could give you nightmares.)
But, with that said, the online world, with real-time tracking of assets, debits, obligations, and investments, provides a perfect place for a trusted advisor, with tools, knowledge, and up-to-date information, to make a real and positive impact. For individuals, it could cut through the complexity and optimize the use of money to achieve goals like retirement and philanthropy. For society as a whole, it could provide funding that creates jobs, supports medical research, and scores of other benefits.
There are many online vendors who claim this nirvana is already here. That may even be true for some of the very rich, who can reliably hold phony vendors accountable. It probably isn’t true for most of us.
Employment Many jobs are found and many employers find candidates online today. But it is taking it a step further to have someone you’ve never met work for you, especially on critical issues. The champion of online person-to-person sales is eBay, but, even before eBay existed, entrepreneurs got stars in their eyes about a similar site for business-to-business sales. What evolved was something that was more restricted and ten times smaller than predictions. The reason was trust. If your success as a business relies on getting widget A by date B, you go with someone you know, not with an unknown organization offering a lower price.
Full trust in business-to-business auctions might allow entrepreneurs to realize the early dream, but I suspect the market for critical employees would dwarf b2b auctions. Much of the work, after all, could be done internationally and done digitally. Some of this is happening (just as some b2b happened), but the big opportunity has barely been touched. And such employment would have a multiplier effect, reaching into communities worldwide.
Social Action I can’t help but wonder if we have already seen the high water mark for social action. The Arab Spring, Occupy, and other protest action got a big boost from having participants that were savvier about social networks than their adversaries. It reminded me of the days on the Internet before malware. Those equivalent days for social networks, I’m afraid, are over. Networks are being monitored, blocked, and infiltrated. Spyware is targeting dissidents in Iran and Syria.
But who knows? Maybe the next next thing will turn things upside-down and create safe havens for free expression and new possibilities.
Innovation Here, I will quote myself (from Innovation Passport):
«Genius happens in groups. The requirements for genius in the past, as with the Lyceum in Greece, or the Renaissance artists, or the intellectuals in Paris in the 30s, have been difficult to emulate in a virtual space. However, mechanisms for creating trust and for sharing more instantaneously and more personally are beginning to emerge. While virtual worlds, such as Second Life, may not in themselves be the answer for creating a café for philosophical discussions, they do point towards new potential for achieving this. It is not difficult to imagine teams of innovators, not co-located, coming together in the future to do things on an innovative level that approaches genius.»
I see such a development as highly probable and extremely powerful. Genius transforms culture, and I expect to live in a world where we have hundreds of genius teams bent on changing the world. Provided we get around the trust problems.
In the next entry, I’ll talk about how we might approach automated trust and what side effects and unintended consequences it might bring.