ETH Zurich/EPFL: Trust in the 21st Century

Human contact, legislation, and contracts are just a few of the human mechanisms developed over centuries to build trust. Today, in transposing these mechanisms into the digital world, breaches and malicious usage hinders digital progress and technologies.

So what does trust mean in a digital context and what models, methods, and tools do we have at our disposal to build meaningful trust quickly in an AI-driven and remote business world? And what role does artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, cryptography, and privacy play in the development of trust?

Furthermore, the rapid increase of global collaboration among individuals and corporations on the one side, and the current lack of tools to build trust mechanisms on the other side, presents a gap that we must address today, if we truly wish to harness the tremendous combined power of human and machine intelligence.