Who can you trust?

Setting computers and technical gadgets aside for a moment – who and what can you trust?

If you trust something to happen – sunrise tomorrow – you perhaps rely on substantial past experience. A philosopher might point out that past experience does not guarantee future: It is somewhat possible that the sun has collapsed 8 minutes ago.

An astrophysicist would counter that based on what we know about stars, ours is still young and has a few billion years left, so no worries.

A meteorologist might ask if you mean that you’ll see the sunrise and would talk about clouds in the morning.

Still the event might not be seen by you if you slept until later and only saw that the sun is up. It must have risen since it is there.

Then what would it mean if you trust another person? That person will always be there for you? Tells you the truth as he/she knows it? Knows the subject, or is just helpfully speculating? How about keeping your secrets?

In brief, humans handle many shades and degrees of trust. Machines handle explicit trust, and poorly at that. For machines ever to be close to us in building relationships and via them collective and individual wisdom – we have a ways to go in technical development.

In the meanwhile – hope you have people you can trust in ways that are important to you.