I'm interested in the concept of trust in the context of secure
autonomous agent computing. Before trying to think about what properties
computer trust should have, I decided to see what philosophers are saying
about trust between people.
In this brief book (100 small pages with lots of white space) O'Neill
discusses not so much what trust is, however, than the necessary
conditions for it to exist in society, and the way many current practices
ostensibly designed to increase it may paradoxically be reducing it. The
discussion covers the question of human rights, accountability and audit,
transparency, and press freedom.
The passive demand by people to be delivered their rights can lead to a
vicious spiral of reducing trust and increasing fear. O'Neill starts from
Kant's argument that we are all moral equals, and so that the
principles we live by should be principles for all, that we should act
only on principles that others may also act on, ruling out deception,
coercion and intimidation, and requiring us to actively uphold the rights
of others. This view moves the citizen from passively demanding their own
rights to actively building a society where everyone's rights are upheld.
Next O'Neill tackles the ever-increasing accountability and auditing
legislation, ostensibly designed to ensure that institutions are behaving
as they should, and hence demonstrate that they are trustworthy. But in
fact the accounting practices are so onerous, and conflicting, that they
impose perverse incentives on the staff (to shorten waiting lists by
treating "easy" problems, rather than urgent ones, for example),
and so end up distorting the very services they were designed to improve,
and make citizens more suspicious. The problem is that the required
accountability isn't to the public, to the people supposed to benefit from
the services, but to the regulators, the government, the paymasters, and
the law.
The next practice to come under the spotlight is the move to ever
greater transparency, which is supposed to reduce secrecy, and
hence enable trust. O'Neill argues that it isn't secrecy that is
the problem, however (we quite happily trust our colleagues without
knowing all the details about their income and their private lives, for
example), but rather deception. We ought to require measures that
reduce the opportunities for deception, that enable us to check the
information on which we base our decisions. Yet transparency can increase
the opportunities for deception, as we drown in masses of uncheckable and
irrelevant data. And it can increase the occurrences of self-censorship
and evasion, as people become less willing to state opinions that will be
made public.
Finally we come to freedom of the press. O'Neill argues that reason for
this freedom is to give citizens uncensored information on which to base
their decisions. And that implies that the press should not be "free"
to disseminate lies, rumours, and gossip as if it were fact.
This is a good read about some very important topics. By going back to
first principles, asking what we want to achieve, and what is necessary to
achieve that, O'Neill has pointed out many flaws and contradictions, and
some downright stupidities, in current policies. It might not address my
original reason for reading it (my problem, not its), but it has certainly
given me food for thought.
