This is a download from the FM 89.9, the Business Station. It's fun Friday. My name is Jeff Sundo, proving once more that he is the man who puts the funeral in fun. Cautobobs, Mad Hamadege is here to ask us who really has your back in this digital world.
It's technology and trust, Matt's plane. So Matt, why are we talking about this cherry issue today? Hey Jeff, well over the last few weeks and months actually we've talked about utopias and dystopias. We've talked about optimism, we've even talked about venture dementia, the idea of this group of mentality that seems to be crowding into our conversations about technology.
So I thought it was time to talk about trust. We hear a lot of talk about fake news. We seem to refer to, or when we see fake news, it often refers to scientists and economists and other qualified people as so-called experts, usually in those quotation marks. Yet we hail business people with a single high profile idea as visionaries, even if they've never turned a single dollar of profit from the idea or the company.
We seem increasingly happy to give our trust to technologies that appear remote, like the algorithms used on Uber and Airbnb, which then tell us to trust a host or a driver. Similarly, those host CR profiles and base their decision to rent a room or pick us up based on our ratings as well. So I thought it was a good time to talk about what trust is and what it seems to be becoming and where it's heading. So what do you mean when we talk about trust?
Well, there's a lot of ways of defining trust, but in short, it's the confidence we have in someone or something that it will be as good as its word or its guarantee. So if I ask you to lend me 50 ringgit, I trust you will never ask for it back. You can trust that it's gone. When you borrow money from a bank, they will usually ask for some kind of guarantee.
In that instance, trust and your good intentions are not considered sufficient. They want some kind of collateral. So trust is something that has evolved over hundreds of years that allows the world to operate with less friction. Is there scientific basis for this trust that you sneak off?
Absolutely. I mean, I'll outline it briefly here. But if you want to know more detail, you can check out a new scientist article called Who Can You Trust by Guy Called Douglas Heaven. We are actually predisposed to make judgments and place our trust in people.
I guess that's one of the reasons why we form tribes and why we're so loyal to the people around us. It also explains why football fans are so annoying and illogical, supporting deadbeat teams season after season. Don't see that. Exactly.
A hormone called oxytocin, flood systems. It's one of the feel good chemicals that our bodies develop. And clinical research has shown that we not only get a boost in oxytocin when we trust someone, we also get a boost when that trust is returned. So we benefit personally from being trusted.
So it's actually in our own self-interest to get people to trust us. So all those people who say trust is for suckers actually missing out on a natural high, which probably explains why they're so miserable in the first place. So let's try and put this in more of a technological context. Why is our relationship with trust today?
Trust is very, very complicated today, as well as the normal interpersonal kind of trust between humans, of which I am actually one. There's a whole lot of technology out there. And a lot of those trust relationships happen without us realising. So for example, our browsers rely on certificates issued by websites that allow secure connections to that site.
Something that is especially vital when we're making purchases online or entering passwords and other personal data. You know, that little HTTP-S on the S on the end, yeah, that little symbol in the window, which shows you that the certificate has been approved. You may have seen a pop-up on your browser saying certificate not trusted or something similar about certain websites. Some operating systems will also flash up a warning if you're trying to download something or install software from what it considers to be an untrusted source.
Now, presumably the same goes for data protection as well. Yeah, exactly. We trust a lot of institutions to look after our information. We trust our employers and our governments to safeguard our personal data.
We trust banks to look after our money and to prevent people hacking or spoofing our accounts. We trust them to be thorough when they issue loans, and they double check that the applicant hasn't stolen someone else's identity. We trust them to behave ethically and not hold us responsible if someone else takes a loan out in our name. And that trust is repeated millions of times over.
It happens with our medical insurers, with our pension plans, happens with loyalty card schemes, up and down the spectrum. We trust Facebook to protect our posts and not to share them beyond our preferred privacy settings. We trust Google to keep our photos safe. We trust Snapchat to delete those pictures after 24 hours.
We place our trust in systems and machines hundreds of times every single day. And at the same time, as we put more and more trust in these automated systems, we seem to trust humans, each other less and less, unless a machine tells us otherwise. What do you mean by that? Well, as I mentioned earlier, with Airbnb and Uber, more and more, we place our trust in people because a machine tells us we should.
We see reviews and ratings written by other people that we don't know or trust, and we gauge the reliability of a host accordingly. Because when you think about it, paying money to sleep in a stranger's spare room is really weird. It's such a weird thing to think about. You know, you do it with hotels and boarding houses because that's actually their business.
But to go into someone's private and intimate space to share their bathroom and their kitchen and their living room, that really is a bit strange. It can be an amazing experience, but it does require a leap of faith. The first time you do it, it does require the leap of faith. Exactly.
And unless you were a very courageous person, you wouldn't stand at an intersection with a sign saying, I need a room, and then get into the first car that pulls up and offers you a bed. You probably decide that that person is precisely the kind of person that you would never accept the offer of a room from. Yet the ratings and algorithms have provided a version of that that we are prepared to trust. Now we'll go for a short break and we'll be right back with trust.
With the cost of the amount of data to be a $99.9.9. Vodacious, fabulous minds. BFM, 89.9, the business station. And we're back.
My name is Jeff Sandour, together with the CollegeBobs, Matt Amatecha. We're Matt's planing trust in this digital world. So we're talking about algorithms and software that are designed to connect people and get them to trust each other. That word algorithm, though, Matt, it's very vague.
What's actually going on? The background, to get us to trust one another. Well, I'll be honest, I really didn't realise that so much what's going on in the background. Again, listeners can check out the new scientist piece, who can you trust for more details.
They take Airbnb as the example. Now that we know that Airbnb protects payments and ensures both the renter and the landlord from risk, what I didn't know was that Airbnb runs all kinds of background checks on the users. It checks whether you're on terrorist or sex offender registers. It checks whether you have criminal convictions.
It also checks for scams to make sure your identity hasn't been stolen. So it digs into your social media and online presence and it can detect unusual patterns of activity that might suggest your account or your card being used fraudulently. Is it a good idea to let machines take over a role we use to trust ourselves? That is the danger, isn't it?
Trust is what makes our societies work. In the good old days when we all lived in villages, we knew everybody around us. So you knew who had a good reputation and who didn't. You knew the people that you could trust.
But as societies get larger, you're forced to interact with people outside of that circle. So that's where we see the emergence of these middlemen and this kind of professional class. Lawyers, accountants, insurers, doctors, merchants, engineers, brokers, people who are able to do those things and we have the trust in their good name or their profession. And as societies and technology grew, we've become more and more dependent on those relationships of trust.
And why are those relationships so important? Well, it used to be if you needed a new furniture, you'd tell the local carpenter, you'd give him a cow and he'd give you a table and some chairs. Now, of course, we go to IKEA. So we have to have the same trust in IKEA as a company as we used to have with that carpenter.
Brands have become those institutions of trust for us. So for the most part, the things we buy, they're well made. And in instances where they aren't, most major manufacturers, they may make you jump through some hoops, but they're reasonably okay at making good on their mistakes. So of course, we do get very upset when those relationships, when that trust relationship breaks down in those olden days, if the carpenter made your table out of rotten wood, you'd storm down to his workshop, you'd probably beat him up a bit and you'd take your cow back.
For larger transgressions, you'd get the town constable to come along and put the carpenter in the stocks for a day or two and the whole town could throw rotten fruit and veg at him until he'd learn his lesson. But when big companies mess up like Volkswagen and its emissions or Samsung and its flaming notes, you can't put a company in the stocks. The system is much more elaborate and complicated. We don't know or have any access to the people responsible for making those poor decisions.
So we rely on other people that we trust, usually law enforcement or government, to make sure that those wrongs are put right. Is it the complexity why the trust system seems to have broken down? A lot of companies do seem to be faceless and anonymous. So yes, it does become very easy to lump them all together.
So when we hear about a company using offshore tax shelters, for example, or closing plants to move jobs to a lower cost location, it erodes that feeling of trust that we have in them. And as that trust collapses, it spreads pretty much like a virus and you begin to doubt the whole system, you start to doubt in one company and then you move to doubting all companies. And even when there is a face, say with Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg or with elected officials the world over, that doesn't mean we have any more trust in those individuals. Even when you look at the workplace, companies seem to be installing all kinds of monitoring devices to make sure that the staff is doing what they're supposed to be doing.
Everywhere you look, we seem to be relying on technology where we used to be happy and trust in those interpersonal relationships. What about trust in terms of individuals? That's one of the most insidious things about the fake news cycle. We don't seem to place as much trust in the science and technology people as we used to.
You know, again, we treat all scientists as though they were the same, whether they're astrophysicists, botanists, marine biologists or virogologists. You hear that refrain, oh, you can't trust scientists. And certain special interest groups have been chipping away at scientific knowledge for the past few decades to advance what is essentially a social and political agenda. I'm not going to go into that now.
I'm not going to get so boxy about this. But the thing is, there are so many things that we have to decide whether to take that leap of faith on. If you reject scientific knowledge, you're actually rejecting huge parts of our society. You're rejecting your phone, you're rejecting your car, you're rejecting the internet, electricity, you're rejecting treated water or cancer treatments, you're rejecting air travel or pre-packaged food or modern architecture.
You know, if that's the existence that you want, that's fine. You can go off, you can build yourself a heart and you can live off the land. But don't call us if you chop your toes off with a sigh and need some medical treatment. Put some tree bark on it like you read on the internet and leave the rest of us alone.
So what do you think trust will look like in the future? Part of the argument with companies like Airbnb or gig economy sites like Made Easy and Caudium is that they're just greasing the wheels. They're providing a medium that allows two strangers to start to trust one another. But it's a very antiseptic form of trust.
It's not very deep. And I think that could be where we're heading. It would certainly be a shame in a sense because, you know, trusting people is a risk and we seem to be coming very risk averse. And you can see it happening with kind of personal relationships as well.
Dating apps are starting to get some pushback because a lot of them operate on the basis of proximity more than matching people's likes. So it's just a numbers game. So often when people meet up through the apps, they have very little in common. Or friendships that are based around social media.
How deep a relationship can you have with someone over Twitter? I would like to think that we can get past this, that we can start trusting again. Otherwise, I think it's going to be a cold and lonely future where a lot of people are married to a mat or a mat. Fun Friday indeed, yet again with College of Pop's Man, I'm going to talk about trust in the future.
We'll be right back with GeeksBox after this, BfM 89.9. Thank you for listening to this podcast. To find more great interviews, go to bfm.my or find us on iTunes, bfm 89.9. The Business Station.