Who Can You Trust?

Book review

Who Can You Trust

by Rachel Botsman

published by Portfolio Penguin


Reading time: 2 mins

“Robots are breaking out of sci-fi culture and engineering labs and moving into our homes, schools, hospitals and businesses.  Now is the moment when we need to pause to consider how much trust we want to place in robots, how human we want them to be, and when we ought to turn them off."

The author(s)

Rachel Botsman is a visiting academic at the University of Oxford and a well-known figure on the speaking circuit (including multiple TED talks).  She co-authored the successful book What’s Mine is Yours (2011), about the sharing economy, and has more recently turned her attention to the underlying human and psychological dimensions of economic transactions.

In a nutshell

This book explores the theory and practice trust.  In particular, it examines the significance of trust in contemporary economies, notably those shaped by the internet, networked platforms and blockchain technologies.  It doesn’t conclude with any novel insights or theories, but it does offer some practical frameworks with which to analyse this important topic.

Scope and scale

Who Can You Trust? is largely concerned with our experiences since the early 1990s, the point at which the internet emerged to “change everything”.  It examines many aspects of trust using informative and often entertaining case studies.

Author: Rachel Botsman

Writing style

Botsman conveys her analysis in a lucid, uncomplicated style, perfectly pitched for books aimed at the generalist reader.  This is neither an academic work (although it is extensively referenced), nor is it a rapidly conceived and poorly edited airport read.  In fact, it’s just about right.

Likes

Who Can You Trust? provokes a degree of self-examination.  It is persuasive in its central premise that trust lies at the heart of all social and economic transactions.  Botsman offers up some familiar and unfamiliar case studies, such as the role played by trust in the Dark Web and the paradigm-shifting potential of blockchains.  Moreover, unlike so many contemporary business books, this one has clearly been edited with care.  In other words, it is mercifully free of the distracting grammatical and spelling howlers typical of lesser publishers.  Well done, Penguin.

Dislikes

There is virtually nothing to dislike in this important book.  The curse of length afflicts almost every book in the business genre, and at only 260 pages Who Can You Trust? still feels like it could have been even shorter and sharper.  As food producers known perfectly well, there is a market paradox that discerning customers will happily pay more for less, e.g. products that are fat-free or those limited in scale but well presented, such as fine dining.  If only publishers could do the same.  However, Botsman can be forgiven on this occasion, because 260 pages is hardly excessive.

Implications for government and the state

Undoubtedly, trust resides at the very heart of the citizen-state relationship, particularly in democracies.  Politicians, civil servants and technologists could all benefit from careful consideration of the issues raised by Botsman.  In particular, the introduction of artificial intelligence to the state’s internal processes will surely bring issues of trust into mainstream popular discourse.  The author notes that “…a significant shift is underway; we are no longer trusting machines just to do something but to decide what to do and when to do it.”  This will surely become one of the great debates of the 21^st Century.

Discussion points

It's estimated that the introduction of advanced technologies will transform the speed and efficiency of many, perhaps most, government services.  The benefits will be measured in billions of dollars, possibly trillions.  However, none of this will be possible if the public believe that machines are failing to act in their best interests.  The era of government by AI has hardly begun, yet questions of accountability and transparency are rapidly coming to the fore.  If AI is a ‘black box’, how will we ever understand its logic, its ‘thinking’?  Indeed, do these words have any meaning in the context of devices or machines that are neither programmed nor directed by real people?  So, can we trust them?

Who will appreciate reading this book?

All generalist readers of business and technology books will enjoy this thoughtful analysis of human transactions.  Marketing and product design professionals should be influenced by its content.  Who Can You Trust? might also appeal to students of philosophy, especially those aiming to apply their learning to the practical concerns of all forms of human transactions in a networked world.

Who will not appreciate this book?

Although academically sound, Who Can You Trust? is not strictly an academic text.  It is unlikely to be included in university reading lists, or cited in future publications.  However, it’s very much a book of the moment, so noone should be deterred from reading it.

Overall impressions

An impressive and accessible examination of an easily overlooked, yet absolutely critical contemporary issue.

Writer: PJ Moar of Moar Partnerships
Email: p.moar@moar.com
Twitter: @MoarPart