Point in history . It is a time when institutions and government are at an alltime low but has a huge surge in the Economy Companies like air bnb, uber and tinder. In areas as diverse as dating, banking, sharing rides or hiring nannies weve been investigating beasthese to understand how technology is transforming trust in exploring what the implications are for the decisionmaking in life, work and business and also completing the study said harvard and lectures she divides her life between sydney and london. We welcome rachel botsman. [applause] good evening everyone thank you for coming. Happy holidays to all of you. It is lovely to come back. Im very excited to talk to you this evening about my work on trust and what i thought we would explore is this trust shift that is happening from institutions and individuals and i hope i can give you a balanced view on conditionhaitians thath good and bad and all different areas of our lives, so im going to talk for a little bit and then open to questions. If you could raise your hand if youve ever been a guest on air bnb. Is anyone a host . It actually requires more trust to be a host than a guest. Raise your hand if you dont know what the theory and is. Okay all of you. I talk about that a little bit. Its like bitcoin. Has anyone been on the dark web and you dont have to tell me what you bought were looked at, and who doesnt know what it is . You can find all kinds of things. I only know of but they are examples of how technology is changing the way we can trust one another. I thought i would start with an important story because when you become obsessed with the topic enough that you dedicate your life to researching it there is a point you start to ask your self where this fascination has come, and i know my fascination and how each guest people and puts faith in people. My mom was going back to work and needed help and for some reason there was this british magazine called the lady. You will know that they hired gardeners and butlers and this woman that answered was called doris and a thick scottish accent. The thing i remember so clearly she was wearing a Salvation Army uniform and these things are very important when they come to trust and they are called signals or clues that we knowingly or unknowingly used to define if someone is trustworthy or not. You are probably tuning in to some of my signals right now but the problem is some are louder than others and sometimes we get influenced by the wrong things. Now doris lived with us for almost ten months and for the most part was a really good by day number three my parents are worried about where she is and they go out to this house and my dad says to you know where doris is because they are running [inaudible] at this point my parents were worried she would come home so they find her room and things you dont want to thank being around when you have Young Children and three days later the priest comes knocking at the door and there was my dad. She wasnt in a word of the Salvation Army, she was robbing banks and has been involved and used the estate as a getaway car. I love this story because my parents left me in the care of her for almost ten months but its interesting when you think about it because my parents often make good judgments but how did they make such a bad decision when it came to doris and white we often place our trust in people that are not trustworthy. They thought they had enough information to make a decision about her but in realitybased a trust gap and this is so profound into what is happening today. That is often in our lives, the illusion of information is actually far more dangerous than ignorance. So, the way to put this is to say trust has two enemies, not one. First is bad character and the second is poor information. The question i started to ask myself in my research is how can technology address these problems and is technology making us smarter about who we trust or encouraging us to place our trust in the wrong people in the wrong places so are we in fact giving our trust a way to the wrong things and is technology playing a role in that . This is going to sound loud and you can use it for the person you think is the least trustworthy. If you think Harvey Weinstein is the least trustworthy person say it now. Okay if you think President Trump, say now. Now this is sophia of the robot and shes the first robot that has citizenship, a citizen of saudi arabia. If you think that this is the least trustworthy person say now. So the robot is more trustworthy than the president of the United States. We dont need to worry about that right now. Lets do this in reverse and you cant clap i would like you to clap for the company you think is the most trustworthy. If you think google is the most trustworthy clap now. Facebook who thinks facebook is the most trustworthy on this slide . No one. Amazon . I think amazon and google were i dont know maybe amazon was slightly ahead but this is simply rubbish exercise but i need you do it because i thought one of you might say to me trust him to do what and this is an important point is something i find hard when i open up the newspapers or listen to the media. The way we talk about trust is in very general terms. Its actually very dangerous because we can trust the President Trump will Say Something ridiculous at 3 a. M. But we dont trust them to negotiate with north korea. We can trust that Harvey Weinstein makes great movies but we dont trust his behavior around women. And amazon is interesting. When people say they trust amazon, they mean they have confidence when they make an order it will show up. This is the first thing i would like you to think about in our own mind and in the institutions and individuals it is highly contextual. You can teach students to get in the car with me because i am a terrible driver. Why did i show you this . If you look at the surveys, they are all telling the same sad story and it is very depressing. So the narrative is that vista debate could trust is a stated crisis and if you look at the survey, trust in all major institutions are not just governments but the charities, religious organizations for big businesses an, bigbusinesses ant an alltime historic low. Now i ask you to really dig into them because one of the problems is the way they answer the question. Do you trust the media, who do you mean and what are you trusting them to do that you can see an histori in historic patth the have to look at. The Government Trust is the institution of the sharpest decline and the sharpest decline is the media. An average of 16 points within less than 12 so theres all kinds of reasons of why this is happening and im going to explain a little bit on why because its basically a lack of faith or confidence in the system and feeling that its failing us and one of the problems is when you look at how it works so this idea that we place our faith in a few meters and they get to operate behind closed doors and keep things secret it is coming out is a symptom of this no matter how powerful they are when they break peoples trust. But, i dont think this narrative is helpful. What it actually does is amplify his peoples anger and i will talk more about that. The other reason there might be narratives is because i think theres plenty of trust out there i if its just going in different directions. So the easiest way to think of it is like energy and no energy cant be destroyed. Its continually changing form a. So the trust that used to flow upwards whether that is to the regulators and experts were academics it is being inverted and is now going sideways through networks and systems and marketplaces. When you look back and look at it as the social glue its like liquid gold. We cant be vulnerable with one another so the trust has always existed but in the first period in history that was to understand the villages and communities and is largely personal so i would trust you and if you did something wrong that would impact the ability to have the relationships in the future. Whether it is Real Estate Brokers or lawyers it isnt flowing directly between people but to institutions. I am not saying they shouldnt exist in society but what is happening is what i call distributed trust and it flows directly between people again on the scale thats never been possible before and sometimes the other person is a real human being and other times it is an artificially intelligent bot. So now some of the consequences iand how we see enabling incredible things but also how we see too much trust in the wrong people isnt necessarily a good thing in three different ways. First, i want to look at the trust in new ideas. They can be new technology but they can also be a new critical idea o the new philosophy so how do people build trust and new ideas . We will try it. Take out your phone and now with the person behind you or next to you you must make sure it is unlocked. I can give you these directions do whatever you want with that persons file and its not a long pier co. Of time. I see there are some nervous workers out there. Youve got ten seconds. You are so respectful. I respect some people didnt want to play this game so they pretended they didnt have a phone. Others you didnt really do anything with the phone you just looked at the other person and there was one or two of you that actually went into the phone and im not looking at you, dont worry about looking at photos, facebook or maybe send a messa message. But i was sensing that it was a little bit uncomfortable. Only 20 seconds so this is what makes many of these i guess so remarkable when you are using thwe are using thetechnology wiy and sharthe daywe share that knh complete strangers. At the time it wasnt what it is today. It was this site where a few things happened. I was writing my first book on the sharing economy and this is the example of people taking their assets and creating value from them. The company is going to be dead by the time it goes to publication. I was glad i stuck to my guns but if you read it its like they have 10,000 properties which is nothing compared to today. The other person im told is my husband and i was told i think i just met the next ebay and i think we should give them money. He said tell me what they do and i said first let me tell you about the entrepreneurs. They are so curious about the world but they are also so resilient and when you see these things so i went into a pitch and keep in mind i only have these photographs im not really selling it very well. This is the beginning and the idea is people around the world are going to open up their bedrooms and obvious rooms they usually keep them and they are going to post photographs on the internet and strangers from all around the world are going to book to stay in these rooms and its going to be the future of travel. He looked at me like youre going to give these people your money and he said a lot can go wrong with this idea is never going to work because strangers will not trust one another with their homes and i said to him i think youre wrong. On ebay people buy secondhand cars without driving them and people trade like this is just the beginning and he made a really good point that ebay was about Online Transactions so when you buy something on ebay you dont nee need that human bg and what i was talking about was using the internet to get off the internet and look at people facetoface. He was right in some ways because it was hard to see how technology would change the way we trust one another and he was also really wrong because you will see it isnt just the holiday homes. If you want to make money go buy a treehouse, one of the most popular categories. You can send igloos and stay in aquariums. So now they are trying to do these experiences and the other day one of the most popular is going to meet someone so i looked up the founders and like so that i dont have to work again. They are making serious money. What theyve done is very smart. Theyve used technology to create a marketplace for assets but never had a marketplace before and this graph really shows that. I think they made a few acquisitions but a company that is built on out the second most valuable in the world id like to show this graph to my husband as a reminder he should always listen to me when it comes to teaching and testing decisions. We had this conversation and you know how some stick in your mind and you cant get rid of them . I said you are building this marketplace and if i took it any further than that he said we are not building a marketplace, we are building a community. They are built on money and most businesses are built on money and money only goes so far. If you create a business built on money becomes transactional and so our business is going to be built on a different currency. If money is the currency of transactions, then this is the currency of interaction and shes absolutely right theres very few organizations and businesses in the world today that actually dont own the currency of trust. So, why is it so significant in this story . Whatever he did what everyone agrees to their hands they take in someone i call each costs lead and thecostleave and they r progress and innovation and how we evolve as a society because what they represent when we take a risk as human beings to do something differently from the way weve always done it. So, when human beings went from bahrain to using money that was a trust lead. The first time people caught in an elevator that was the trust link. The first thing you use ebay or put your credit card on a website, the first time we all get into self driving cars and let the car takeover, that will be a trust deep and what technology is doing is accelerating the pace at which we are leaving so its asking us to leave higher and faster than ever before which is why as human beings we feel this constant state of change in our lives. How does this work . Even if you are just placing your faith in someone you just met, trust is a process. Its not a value or something we can communicate, it is a process that happens between people or things or algorithms. If you are asking someone to trust, they are in this known state and human beings love being in this known state. That is what we gravitate towards. Whenever it is unknown from an unknown place, person or idea, between the two things is what we call a risk. It is the management. Not all risks matter. Some matter. The easiest way to think about trust is that its a bridge between the known and the unknown. Some people think i trust this person because i know the outcome. If you know the outcome then you dont need to trust. This explains how its a magical alchemy of being one sent a mixed debate the weird mixture of our hopes and expectations. So looking at the flipside of this is what trust is coming competitive relationship with the unknown added that its important to keep in mind when you look at the flipside of this for when trust breaks down. The great thing about being someone who researches trust as i have a lot of new material every single week someone or something or some company in the world creatures or trust. So, the paradise papers, the news corp. Phone hacking, the fulks wagon and mission scandal. Whats interesting is when you look at these scandals, you see the same pattern of the breakdown in trust. One of the root causes i think is the lack of accountability. So this feeling that people can do terrible things. The ceo of volkswagen, when he left, he got a multimillion dollar payout. What does that mean for the organization thato theorganizate like this and its okay. One of the things that is dangerous is when the leaders and organizations know about something and keep it hidden so if you think about the data breach, they knew about it for six weeks before they told anyone. Executives sold their shares when they found out about it so one of the things thats been interesting to me is watching how the Companies Respond and its a little painful because every time you see them get it wrong that its actually not that hard to respond to the trust for each to rebuild trust and think of the line between the two things youve really got to deal tha the santa fe four sp process so the first is responsiveness. So they think they have a long time to respond. Second is ownership. If you read the description of what went wrong they often point the finger at some low level employee and say it was an individual act. This problem is known as the next step and third is empathy. What i mean by empathy is addressing the human consequence to the breach of trust. What does this mean for human life and then the fourth step is accountability. Its so important because in order to trust again you have to believe that someone has changed. You have to have confidence in the system. When only one banker went to jail i didnt feel like the Financial System had been reformed so these are the things we need to do when trust breaks down. Lets move on and look at trust and technology. Im talking about everything here. I know this is topical at the moment. Another really big driver is in fact misinformation. So the Economic Forum actually says that misinformation not just fake news because there is a distinction that misinformation is one of the top ten threats to society. Why is it such a threat to society . Because what happens is we can go online and we can find information. When we find the information exemplifies the anger and then the cycle is magnified. Why is that so dangerous . Because certain people know how to manipulate the cycle so thats why hes always talking about this trust in the media because it creates a vacuum for conspiracy theories. It creates a vacuum for people who are very smart to talk about feelings over facts and we may not like it, but he represents a form of transparency to many people. He is a voice against things they didnt believe in, the lack of faith and establishment in the system. So the thing about the information in fake news is that its very hard to detect. So all these three pieces of content are pieces that appeared at the top of my facebook feed. And i had the same reaction. So the one in the middle about the pope endorsing donald trump was fake. I wasnt so sure about the crisis now breaking out in atlanta but i thought the boston globe was real. After the immigration ban and this is a real issue because what i realized when i thought about if i wa it i was very angt facebook and i realized i have a responsibility in this because without actually thinking about it, i outsource my capacity to talk about the algorithm so when two thirds of americans are using facebook as their source of news, theyve outsourced their capacity to trust a source of algorithm and whats interesting to me as we are quick to blame the platforms but the platforms are only the mirror of our behaviors of what the community does. And what ive seen is