Trust and Technology - Trust Theory: A Socio-Cognitive and Computational Model - page 348

12.3 Concluding Remarks
It is now clear - even in engineering - that when we build a new technology, for direct
human use, in fact we are building a new 'socio-tecnical system' and even a new 'cognition'
dealing with and incorporating that mental, pragmatic, and social 'extension'. This is true
with mechanical engineering (factories, cars, tractors, etc,) but is much more important with
cognitive and social technologies: like computers, web, and their mediation and support
of the entire human individual and social activity, from study and learning to work, from
friendship and communities to political participation, from market and business to smart
learning environments.
We have to design hand in hand with technology the cognitive, interactive, and collective
dimensions. More precisely, we have to design technology with those incorporated dimensions .
But in order to do this one should have the appropriate understanding of those dimensions
and some theoretical abstraction of them and some possible modeling of them. Otherwise we
proceed just in an empirical, haphazard (trials and errors) way.
This is why we believe that a deep and complete model of trust (including the cognitive,
emotional, decisional, social, institutional) dimension be not just useful but necessary.
In particular, we believe that to support this kind of human computer, human ambient,
human robot interaction, and computer-mediated/supported interaction, organization, work,
etc. a technology able to deal with typical human cognitive and social features and phenomena
(like expectation, intentions, preferences, like emotions, trust, etc. like norms, roles, like
institutions, collectives, etc.) must be designed. A technology endowed with autonomous
learning, decentralization, acquisition of local and timely information; able to reason and
solve problems; endowed with some proactivity and a real collaborative (not just executive)
attitude. We think that autonomous computational 'agents' will play a significant role. But
if this is true this will make even more central the role of trust and delegation and of their
modelling.
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