Dystrustopia: A new word and a warning

In any relationship, from interpersonal to large collaborative endeavours, trust is perhaps the most valuable commodity. Trust is a necessary thread in the fabric of any society. It underpins healthy, productive human relationships and allows cooperation. But as we coalesce in ever larger communities, and interact in more digital domains, for cooperation to scale, our impersonal relationships require trust in institutions.

Two neighbours may agree to drain a meadow, which they possess in common; because ‘tis easy for them to know each other’s mind; and each must perceive, that the immediate consequence of his failing in his part, is the abandoning the whole project. But ‘tis very di?cult, and indeed impossible, that a thousand persons should agree in any such action; it being di?cult for them to concert so complicated a design, and still more di?cult for them to execute it; while each seeks a pretext to free himself of the trouble and expense, and would lay the whole burden on others.

David Hume (1739)

We tend to underestimate the importance of institutions in maintaining impersonal cooperation, but enforcement is central to the evolution of cooperation "across all scales of biological organization."

So, how healthy is trust in our institutions?

Well, not very. Trust in institutions has been trending downwards hitting record lows according to UN data, Gallup surveys and the Edelman Trust Barometer . Business, and in particular small business, remains among our last remaining trusted institutions. But this trusted position comes with the expectation that businesses take more responsibility in social and political spaces. Businesses are increasingly being pushed by employees or customers to take stances on controversial topics. Advocacy that is forced or carelessly framed, that is unrelated to, or inconsistent with a company's strategy or purpose can severely damage trust .

Research on perceptions of hypocrisy partly explain loss of trust with ham-fisted CSR or instances of corporate social irresponsibility but taking divisive positions on highly charged political issues can also alienate customers and employees and impact trust (US bias noted). Trust as a commodity is slowly won but quickly lost. Cynicism can be a major destroyer of trust, not just at the impersonal level but also damaging personal relationships. Businesses must take more care than even in Navigating A Polarised World.

The loss of trust can go beyond the impersonal and many countries citizens risk losing faith in each other - lacking ability to recognise commonalities and lacking any spirit of generosity towards each other’s motives. Disagreement has become divisive “affective” polarisation (See for example American Partisan Antipathy ). Affective polarisation sees an amplification of in-group and out-group biases based on perceptions of others.

As we increasingly interact, both personally and professionally, across digital media we subject ourselves to an ongoing Turing Test where our perceptions of others can be crafted by algorithms and bad actors.

With the pervasiveness of social media, we navigate online landscapes of uncivil and manipulative behaviour ; trolls, sock puppets, bots, false flags, fake news, misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, where we are also prone to echo chambers and filter bubbles.

We have never been so information-rich. But we interact in information-poor spaces with bad faith interpretations, lack of context defenestration, photoshopped images, memes-as-reality, and deceptively edited videos where Brandolini’s Law – that bullshit spreads faster than debunking or correction efforts - reigns. Trust appears to be negatively correlated to the preponderance of bullshit. And we are about to enter an era of potentially industrial levels of manufactured bullshit.

People will soon be able to fully and easily fake i.e., artificially create:

·??????images / art

·??????video

·??????natural language

·??????assignment or exam submissions

·??????voices

·??????people

To be clear, all of the above can be used for fun or for creative-productive pursuits and A.I. can empower humans and augment and support jobs. And maybe you say the current tech produces outputs that are clunky and identifiably fake. But improvements are progressing at amazing speed.

So here is the warning.

A.I. can potentially be used to “flood the zone with shit ” and erase human livelihoods. With fully generated online entities, a wholly unreliable information landscape becomes our potential future. Filled with doubt, cynicism and warped perceptions of each other, human trust-based cooperation could unravel in fully fabricated realities. When deepfakes get real enough to be indistinguishable how will we maintain trust? Watch (not) Morgan Freeman invite you to experience this synthetic reality.

A decade ago, in prepping and delivering a psychology module called Modelling Cognitive Systems it was clear to me we had made significant leaps in the move from Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence (GOFAI) that required symbols and rules (programming) to perform well-defined tasks to connectionist approaches involving neural networks, training-based machine and deep learning algorithms that are far more flexible and powerful. Jeremy Howard’s TED Talk very simply explained this change that was coming down the tracks. Howard invited a discussion (that has yet to be properly had at societal level) to consider how we adjust our social and economic structures to a reality that sees computers match and surpass human ability in the workplace. Beyond work, we need to consider the impact on human societies and relationships – a connectivity based on trust.

I don’t have an answer to a potential Dystrustopia, it may not happen at all. But as individuals, as businesses, as economies and societies, we cannot just think of how we leverage new technology to improve productive capacity. How do we maintain trust in our interactions? How do we promote transparency, authenticity, and purpose? How do we elevate and prize human qualities over behavioural output? How do we stabilise our information landscape and educate and upskill for an empowered rather than subservient relationship with technology? Hume talked of knowing each others mind and the importance of shared perceptions in his illustration of the Commons dilemma. It is so important we all have a common reality to anchor to - negotiation, compromise, politics - it all collapses should we lose that. He worried about the impersonal. We need to prioritise the personal and the human in our online experiences.

There is a place for technological innovation in the solution to all the above. We just need to be sure we exploit technology not just for value creation in the replacement or enhancement of human DOING, but that we use it to enrich our experiences of human BEING.