Figure 10.1: Global migration between 2005 and 2010 across the world (Source: Circos/Krzywinski, M. et al.)
“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
Ernest Hemingway
There was a time when I knew everyone who lived near me. The Calcutta (these days it’s called Kolkata) I grew up in was like that; residential areas had very little turnover, people lived (and died) in houses where their family had lived for decades, sometimes centuries. Very rarely, someone moved, because of rites of passage, and someone new would enter that fragment of society. Long before that happened, everyone else would know everything there was to know about the neighbours-to-be. How many of them there were. Where they were coming from. Why here and why now.
Ours was a high-trust society. Everyone knew everyone and everything. Crime was low. People didn’t lock their doors. They didn’t have to. A stranger would be spotted long before he or she could get anywhere close.
In those days we had a lot of home delivery. The milk came, still in the cow, served fresh at the door. Papers were delivered at dawn. The pot-and-pan man would exchange old saris for shiny new cooking vessels. The comic-wala would do his mobile lending library bit, walking miles while carrying his wares in voluminous satchels. Hawkers would walk past with fruit and the sugarcane man would wend his way. In summer, the ice-cream man would show up occasionally, it all depended on whether he had any ice left by the time he got to our street. Ice that was covered in wood shavings and hessian in order to try and extend its life.
Entertainment also came to the door. Monkey grinders, snake charmers, flautists, even the odd bear tamer. We didn’t have television in those days, the transistor radio hadn’t made its way to our shores as yet, and the valve version needed something that was scarce at the time—electricity. So we played in the street: cricket, football, hockey, skipping, hopscotch, cowboys and Indians, tag, whatever. And we were safe.
Everybody knew everybody. Even the itinerant vendors were often regulars, generation upon generation. A high-trust environment. Essential for society, for business, for pleasure. The Calcutta I describe was where I grew up nearly 60 years ago; by the time I left there 35 years ago, it had already begun to change. A diaspora was coming.
This wasn’t just about Calcutta. There was a time when it was common everywhere for most people to live and die within a few miles of where they were born. Migrations happened, but usually in bulk, and usually because there was some irresistible force. Invaders wanting to kill you. Drought. Famine. Earthquake. That sort of thing. Migration was expensive, too. So you didn’t do it unless you had to or unless you wanted particularly to be an explorer, in which case you had to find yourself a patron, preferably royal and well-heeled. Yes, migration was expensive.
With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, all of this began to change. We learnt earlier in the book about the machine age’s effect on employment, but the side effect of inventions like the bicycle, trains, steamships, cars and planes was that each in turn began to gradually decimate the cost of migration. It was only a matter of time before individuals began to exercise their new-found right to migrate. And so they did. The diaspora had arrived. A cursory look at the patterns and volume of human migration over the last two hundred years will tell you all you need to know about that phenomenon.
As the cost of individual migration dropped, and as public policy removed some of the other frictions, the pace of the diaspora became unrelenting. Soon it became normal for city dwellers not to know their neighbours, so much so that people actually began to revel in their new-found anonymity. After all, they didn’t have to deal with the social brake of gossip any more, and they could enter a hitherto forbidden world of anything goes. Trust died. Nobody knew anybody anymore.
Fast-forward to the late 20th century, and something new started to happen. The cost of person-to-person communication began to drop. When I left India in 1980, it cost me over £1 per minute to phone my mother from the United Kingdom, at a time when my take-home pay after tax and bills was around £100 per month. That was when you used to have to wait at least three years to get a landline in India. Today, I can Skype my mother for nothing, and get a mobile phone while waiting for my luggage at the airport on arrival. Times change.
Figure 10.1: Global migration between 2005 and 2010 across the world (Source: Circos/Krzywinski, M. et al.)
As the costs dropped, more and more people began to get connected with each other; and so to today, where families and friends may be physically disparate yet otherwise connected. And through these connections, trust begins to emerge again.
Closed immobile societies were torn apart as humans could afford to migrate at whim, and we learnt to live in low-trust environments. Then, as humans could afford to reconnect at whim, we began to rebuild the closeness of erstwhile societies, physically separate yet logically close. We began to learn how to scale trust, in fact we had to.
The Internet, the web and smart mobile devices have all had roles to play in this, and it’s exciting to explore the possibilities afforded by the explosion in wearables, implantables, ingestibles and other forms of augmentation that Brett and Alex mentioned in chapters 5 and 6. Connectivity helps solve some of the problems of trust in a distributed world, and augmentation of trust has the power to extend this capability in ways we don’t yet fully understand.
To understand what that might be, it’s worth taking a leaf out of the book of a very old and long-established industry—banking. Let’s take the term “bankrupt”. Where did it come from? Centuries ago, bankers used to conduct their business sitting on benches, derived from the Italian word bancos. In fact, that’s how they got the name “bankers”, from those very benches.
When the bankers met, they worked on the basis that a gentleman’s word was his bond. All was hunky-dory as long as each person kept his word; the community was at peace. Trust levels were high. But if a banker’s word turned unreliable, trust was broken, and this was not a good thing. Consequently, the others would pick up the banker’s bench and break it in half, in effect ejecting them from the circle of trust. The banco was rottura, or ruptured. Banco-rottura became banko-rupt. You see, bankruptcy was never just about money; it has always been about trust. The trust that was central to the 14th-century economy of Sienna and Verona was a trust that let you do something, be part of something, usually a trading community. And this trust could be taken away if you didn’t act in keeping with the values of that community.
Bankers too had to deal with the challenges of diaspora and distance. There was a time when everyone knew everyone. Then along came shipping and trade routes and suddenly people wanted to do business with each other across great distances, and without really knowing each other to begin with. Nature abhors a vacuum; so does business. An opportunity was smelt, and the merchant bank of the trading empires was born. These banks worked closely with the trading houses as well as the burgeoning London Money Market. They formed an Acceptance Houses Committee that had an agreement with the discount houses in the London Money Market. If a bill had to be discounted in some far-flung place (far-flung from London, that is), then as long as a member of the Acceptance Houses Committee could be found to vouch for the bill payer, all was good. That member “accepted” the bill by signing it, and upon seeing the signature of an accepting member, the discount house would provide the funds. So the discount house no longer had to know the organisation upon whom the bill was drawn, it only had to recognise the acceptance house.
Friend of a friend, or FOAF, has long been a traditional route to solving problems of trust over distance. Come to think of it, that’s probably how passports came into use. The person who bears this document is a friend of mine. You’re a friend of mine as well. Please look after them while they are in your territory, as a favour to me.
When I was growing up in India, there was no centralised way to clear cheques there. If you had a cheque drawn on some bank far away, it was classed as an “outstation” cheque; it had to be posted by your bank to the other bank, the funds had to be remitted to your bank (also by post) and weeks, sometimes months, later, you would be able to get to those funds.
If your bank knew the person who had drawn the cheque, it may have offered to “purchase” the cheque. This meant giving you the funds in advance of them clearing, but for a fee. If you were a very important customer, the bank may even have waived the fee. Sometimes, even if the bank didn’t know the drawer of the cheque, but it knew the drawee (you) very well, it may have done the same thing as a favour, on the basis that you were good for the money in the event the cheque went bouncy bouncy. Friend of a friend, in different dimensions.
When I moved to the United Kingdom, there were some other notable developments in this space. You could “special” a cheque. What this meant was that your bank would do something very simple. It would call the other bank, the bank the cheque was drawn on, and say, “Hey we have this cheque drawn on one of your accounts, is it any good?” And if the answer was in the affirmative, you’d have your money. This was the trust network between banks.
Credit and debit cards were also instruments of trust in different ways. If you were travelling in a foreign land, the signs for Amex or Diners or Visa meant a number of things. You could pay without having to use up the limited amount of cash you carried. (After all, who wants to carry loads of cash in a place you’ve never been to before, a place you barely know?) More importantly, if something went wrong with your purchase, there was some sort of guarantee in place. Most of the time, your card provider would stand for the transaction, refunding you in the event of fraud or malfeasance.
Those trust dimensions have now permeated into the world of e-commerce. I can still remember the first time I entrusted the web with my credit card details. Yes, I cannot tell a lie, it was Amazon. Its “one-click” was what finally got me. As a voracious book reader and collector, I was there to be got. And got I was. I entrusted it with my credit card details, and spent happily in the knowledge that Amazon would refund me if anything went wrong. This is how I went seamlessly into ZShops, its original marketplace, which I guess has been merged into the main site now. The freedom to buy goods for value from people I don’t know in places I had never heard of. A freedom made possible because I only had to trust Amazon, I didn’t need to know much about the entity I was buying from.
Banks were platforms, initially isolated, later networked, much later interconnected. Credit and debit cards went through the same evolution: isolated platforms that grew exponentially as they interconnected and became interoperable. The Internet and the web made each of us participants in a much greater platform, and the same network effects were afforded to us as well.
And then the smart mobile device came along and made all this possible on the move, allowing us to discover trust “independent of time and distance”. Context became discoverable: we could identify where we were, who and what we were near, what was approaching us, the whole nine yards.
That’s the context into which the Augmented Age fits today. Augmentation will allow us to do many things we could not do any earlier. How so? There are four distinct avenues that progressively build upon each other in respect to the development of augmentation and how it effects our perception of ourselves, our community and the trust that links us.
We have to imagine wearables and personal AI as the extension of our desktops and mobile devices, with the ability to connect to those devices, the ability to receive notifications and alerts from them. So now your watch or your wristband, or your glasses or your belt, or your shirt or even your bionic ear is able to receive messages from others, or a synthesis of data from your personal AI. In the days of the PC, you could only see those messages if you were by your device. As you moved to laptops and portables, you could receive them where you were, but only in places where it was socially acceptable for you to look. You can’t take your laptop out of your case in the middle of a film or concert, or at dinner, just to check for messages. Tablets have the same problem of social unacceptability. Phones are borderline. However, discreetly checking your watch is usually okay. “Your bank balance is close to your overdraft level.” “Please buy milk on the way home.”
“Four of your Facebook friends are in this lounge.” “The following open WiFi networks have been detected in range of where you stand.” “There’s trouble ahead on the road.” Brett described many of these types of contextual developments or alerts that could take place in the emergence of personal head-up displays, too.
One of the ways in which trust is maintained in physical and logical networks is that you need multifactor authentication to get in. Wearables extend the possibilities in this respect, using near field communications or geolocation tagging to signal your presence and acceptability, a permission that you add to with some other form of identification or signalling. Wearables will even allow certain behavioural heuristics or biometrics like your individual heartbeat to be a unique access token or trust indicator.
It’s not hard to imagine a world where each of us represents some peculiar scarcity, that we keep the knowledge of the scarcity to ourselves, but when it comes to an emergency, the scarcity is discoverable and able to be encoded or signalled. What kind of scarcity? A person who has a rare blood type may want to have that fact suppressed but make it available in an emergency, just by hitting a switch, or in the instance that the wearable or ingestible detects an emergency.
All of this, of course, is in addition to “traditional” modes of augmentation, those that existed before the current wave of the Internet of Things and the wearables revolution.
In those traditional modes, your vision and your hearing could be “augmented” by information that was pulled down from the cloud; the original Shazam service was a classic example, where the service would display the details of the song being played. Over the last decade or so, a number of such services have emerged, with the same construct and principle. View or listen to something. Send a snapshot of that view or sound segment to an external service, get a reply that adds to the information you have about that view or sound. That’s basic augmentation.
What’s been happening recently is of a different order, as context truly enters the zone of augmentation. So now it’s not just what you’re viewing or hearing that gets augmented, you also receive information about the context. In its simplest form, it’s like being told “people who did A also did B”, as a comment on what you just did or intended to do. Instructive, simple collaborative filtering. People who bought this book also bought this one. People who liked this song also liked this group.
The era of “social logins” like Facebook Connect is one of the most powerful moves made in this regard. It does this by bringing together the power of the social graph into play, augmenting the information we have access to in order to make a decision. I’m a child of the late 1950s, which means I like listening to music made between 1964 and 1977, give or take a few years. Maybe I should just say, “I like music made in the Sixties and Seventies.” Strangely enough, when I go to concerts nowadays, that statement can be interpreted differently: I now spend time listening to musicians who are in their sixties and seventies (and a few in their eighties as well, though I never was a fan of that decade).
I therefore land up booking tickets to go to these concerts: with human longevity increasing, there are more and more people my age wanting to do our not-quite-geriatric-yet thing, so demand for these concerts is high. Leonard Cohen and John Mayall are probably the first two musicians over 80 that I have seen perform live; Bob Dylan, Donovan, Jethro Tull/Ian Anderson, The Moody Blues, Paul Simon, the Grateful Dead, Steve Winwood, Eric Clapton, John Martyn, Pentangle, Don McLean, Cat Stevens, the Rolling Stones, Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, Crosby, Stills & Nash, you get my drift. When I book tickets, another form of augmentation kicks in, because I use a social login. Would I like to go on Saturday or on Sunday? Here are the friends going on Saturday, here are the ones going on Sunday. Would you like to sit near your friends or as far away from them as possible so they don’t see you dancing like a mad man? Choices.
Human beings engage with each other in relationships of trust. That trust was easy to build and retain in the closed system of historical small towns and villages, when human migration was low. All that changed when we began to migrate at will a couple of hundred years ago, and the rate of migration continues to grow. That migration, that continuing diaspora, creates a challenge in terms of trust. The “connected world” we live in seeks to overcome that challenge in a number of ways, teaching us how to “scale” trust.
That scaling of trust is to some extent enabled and accelerated by our devices, our wearables and our ability to augment the information we’re presented with. Augmentation of this sort helps us with identity (who is this? what is this?), context (where is this? when is this?) and relationship (who else knows this person or thing? who amongst my friends has seen this? who amongst my friends has experienced this?). Reputation and rating schemes are ways to standardise some of this feedback: my children tend to check Rotten Tomatoes before they even consider going to see a film.
It’s not just about trust: there are many other ways in which the connected world, the social graph, wearables and augmentation improve our lives. Alex described how the quantified self is improved by measuring your own performance against your peers, or even working out with your peers. Peer group data, however, is being used in even simpler ways to form sort of trust “contracts”.
All of these social platforms are leading us to make better decisions. One category of those decisions—whom to trust—is more important than any other, when it comes to living our lives.
Today, we can choose a restaurant or coffee shop based on a rating from our peers. In real time, we can ask the crowd for a recommendation. We can look at a peer-group or influence score like Klout and assess an individual’s suitability for a certain task or whether we should trust their advice. We can review their employment history and whether anyone has recommended them on a forum like LinkedIn, or even ask a shared connection for their opinion on their suitability for a job. An Uber driver is rated based on their smile, service approach and vehicle cleanliness. Given that, some might only opt to take an Uber vehicle if the driver has a 4.5 score or higher or if someone in your network has vouched for the driver. Uber customers are rated as well. Customers with a score of 4.8 or higher get the option to choose Uber’s VIP drivers when they book a car.
Trust, like everything else in this world, is becoming real time. We went from those days in Calcutta where everyone knew everyone else and trust was a very tangible element of that close-knit society to a society where everyone was essentially anonymous. Anonymity created the potential for “fear”—I don’t know who you are, you look different, you don’t speak my language, etc. But the augmented world will allow you to establish trust in real time.
In the old world, everyone was connected: I knew your parents and they knew me. There are probably still people living in that old part of Calcutta who can tell you a story of the mischief I got up to as a lad. But we lost some of that connection as the world became more mobile, as migration occurred as societies became more complex and less homogeneous.
As we once again become connected, this time via sensors, data, social and context, we’ll have to think about trust and privacy in different ways.
I have a thesis here that trust and privacy could actually be at odds in a community that requires trust to operate efficiently. The more private you make your world, then the less trust is implied or implicit. If I don’t know you, how can I possibly trust you? This is really where the pendulum of trust is swinging back towards more transparency and openness in the Augmented Age, largely spurred on by social media, data and collective awareness.
There is obviously data we hold sacred. Our heart rate, our fingerprint, our home address and other such data are things that we may very strongly feel need to be protected today. At the same time, however, we likely share our Waze app data, our pictures taken around the home and other such artefacts that have our home address encoded within the data.1 If we’re going to get advanced medical care in the future, we’ll need to share bio data. All of this is somewhat fungible in the traditional sense. There’s black, white and grey.
Today, if we want to travel on a commercial airline, we need to share our personal information with an airline and security staff at the airport. If we don’t, they just won’t let us fly. Why do we trust an airline employee to deal with our date of birth and home address more than someone in our place of work, for example? It’s somewhat arbitrary, but those signals are encoded in interactions. Some interactions require more transparency, less privacy.
Signals of trust will become implicit components of the world we live in, but what data needs to be shared for you to be trusted? If you walk into a retail store, I don’t need to know if you have a criminal record, where your children go to school or whether you are in good physical health. However, I do need to know that you have enough money in your account to make a transaction, enough information to verify that you haven’t stolen someone’s digital wallet.
Whether data, our network of friends or just messages that come from our network or sphere of influence, the augmented world will be about trade-offs, exchanges in value and trust built in real time.
Ironically, the more you seek to hide your data from the world, the more private you seek to become, the less trusted you could be. While there is data that must be secured, must be held as private for the majority of interactions that will take place in the augmented world, other data must be more open. You won’t be able to drive a self-driving car and tell it not to share any of its data with other vehicles or the satellite network that helps its navigation—it would be a disaster for you and those around you. If you refuse to wear a heart rate monitor or use ingestibles for biofeedback, then you’ll be penalised by having to pay higher health and insurance premiums. If you don’t have a digital employment profile, then it will be assumed you are either a Luddite or you have something to hide.
If you insist on being absolutely, truly private, the augmented world will treat you with suspicion. Just like those days in Calcutta. If you moved into our old neighbourhood and didn’t make yourself known quickly, then everyone would start making up stories about who you were and what skeletons you had in your closet. The easiest way to tackle that mistrust was to be open, and move to quickly establish some credibility. The augmented world is once again just like that.
We warn our kids not to put their personal information on Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat but, 20 years ago, we were very comfortable having a telephone book distributed across the city that contained our name, address and phone number for all to see.
The Augmented Age will allow you to be more secure and have more control over what data you share than ever before, but be prepared that there will be a minimum required level of transparency in order for you to credibly function in this society. Trust in the Augmented Age is correlated absolutely with your adoption of technology, and leveraging that technology in a digitally enabled community. You won’t be able to establish trust without sharing, without the tech or the profile. Sure, don’t overshare, but don’t be a stranger either.
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1 Exchangeable Image File (EXIF) data in image files often contain GPS or location tags.
