Trust and Technology - Trust Theory: A Socio-Cognitive and Computational Model - page 337

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Trust and Technology

In this topic our effort is to model and rationalize the trust notion trying to catch all the different
and varying aspects of this broad concept. In fact, there are today many studies, models,
simulations and experiments trying to integrate trust in the technological infrastructures: The
most advanced disciplines in Human-Computer Interaction (Baecker et al. , 1987), (Card
et al. , 1983) and (Dix et al. , 2004), Distributed Artificial Intelligence (Lesser, 1990), (Hewitt
and Inman, 1991), (Weiss, 1997), Multi-Agent Systems (Wooldridge, 2002), (Shoham and
Leyton-Brown, 2008), and Networked-Computer Systems (Grid, Semantic Web, etc. (Foster
and Kesselman, 2003), (Antoniou and van Harmelen, 2008) and (Davies, 2006)) are forced to
cope with trust.
But why does trust seem to be so important in the advanced technological contexts? Is it
necessary to involve such a complex, fuzzy and human related concept? Is it not sufficient to
consider just more technical and simply applicable notions like security?
To give a satisfactory response to these questions we have to evaluate which kind of
network infrastructures are taken into consideration in the new communication and interaction
scenarios, which kind of peculiar features should have the artificial agents we have to cope
with, which kind of computing is going to invade (pervade) the future physical environments?
In fact, trust becomes fundamental in the open multi-agent systems where the agents (which
could be both human beings and artificial agents owned by other human stakeholders) can
(more or less freely) enter and leave the system. The evolution of the interaction and commu-
nication technological paradigms toward human style, is, on the one hand, a really difficult
task to realize, but, on the other hand, it potentially increases the people accessing to (and
fruitful in using) the new technologies. In fact, in the history of their evolution humans have
learned to cooperate in many ways and environments; on different tasks; and to achieve dif-
ferent goals. They have intentionally realized (or they were spontaneously emerging) diverse
cooperative constructs (purely interactional, technical-legal, organizational, socio-cognitive,
etc.) for establishing trust among them.
It is now necessary to remodel the trust concept in the new current and future scenarios (new
channels and infrastructures of communication; new artificial entities, new environments) and
the efforts in the previously cited scientific fields (HCI, MAS, DAI, NCS) are trying to give
positive answers to these main requirements.