Enabling Human Trust in Ecosystems: The Hybrid Human-Machine “Trust” Blockchain

Dear all – in our work we continuously see that the “key” to accelerating the diffusion of innovations from ideation to market saturation lies in the trust that participants in the innovation web have in each other. Rapidly scaling the trust of personal relationships across larger and larger user groups and ecosystems is then a critical capability needed in order to tackle geographical, temporal and cultural etc. diversity among participants. In search of tools to enable scaling we automatically arrive at the concept of blockchains with their enabling infrastructure.

Blockchain has established itself as an effective technology to protect data and thus ensure secure data transactions on many levels. However, to date, blockchain has focused on connecting “devices” in information systems only. Blockchain is a solution focused on tangible things and by choice blends out human exchanges. A definite caveat however is the high energy usage which contradicts efforts to reduce climate change.

On the human side we see activities such as the Social Credit System (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System) which might act as orientation for the “values” and “rewards” that can / need to be managed via blockchain approaches.

Participants in a technology supported trust-based ecosystem must be continuously rewarded with credits for trustworthy behaviour (or “mine” such credits) whereby this value is then captured using blockchain type approaches. These credits are presumed to act similar to “Likes” or “Recommendations” in social media and online commercial etc. platforms. Since we are focused on the sharing of sensitive personal cyber safety related knowledge the need for anonymity probably remains and we need to take a hard look at why the various Corona Apps (which are focused on sensitive personal medical information) are not working as intended.

The image provides a first attempt to capture the fundamental object of analysis which is the exchange between two actors in an ecosystem. Termed a “gene” we consider this to link to many (“n” number”) of others resulting in a DNA type analogical manner. Important to recognize is that the unit assuming a role can be a human OR a machine (i.e. a network device), while the intangible exchanges “enable” the exchanges in the first place – intangibles thus act as the “muscles” operating the “bones” (tangibles) leading to measurable activities.

Interestingly enough, I do not feel we need to “enable” this behaviour. Rather, we need to make this behaviour more transparent and trustworthy in LATE ADOPTER groups who remain our target group.

The ACT-FASTER! proposal will probably need to seek funding for moving from a TRL 5 (working prototype in test environment) to TRL 8 (actual solution working in real environment). In this respect the challenge after running our primary research (interview) will be to design a prototype and see what it takes to operate it (similar to the ACT-FAST! pilot we have running on on WhatsApp)

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