Design for the Value of Trust

Throughout their history, methodologies like Design for Values have taken trust as an important value in relation to technology. At first, this referred exclusively to the idea that technology influences human trust relationships, and that technology developers should take interpersonal trust into consideration as a value to be optimised and balanced. More recently, it has become common in policy and technology design circles to hold that technologies themselves are possible objects of trust and distrust, and that autonomous technologies such as AI should be designed to be trustworthy. However, the value of trust in technology can be problematic in various ways: some philosophers have warned that trusting technology is impossible, misleading, or even dangerous. In this chapter, after an introduction of conceptions of trust, we set out a moderate view on which trustworthiness can reasonably be attributed to technology. Making technologies trustworthy has limitations because trustworthiness and trust are only loosely related, and because trust is not an unconditional good. We examine three core examples here, namely trust in the context of social media platforms, neurotechnology and “trustworthy” generative AI. Looking at these examples, we argue for a rich conception of trust in, and through, technology, that is open to interdisciplinary treatment, and thus open for empirical and technical exploration.