Trust and Technology (original) (raw)

In this book 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-) 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 communication 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 different 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. Trust Theory: A Socio-Cognitive and Computational Model Cristiano Castelfranchi and Rino Falcone