Trust, Ethics and Automation: Anticipatory imaginaries in everyday life

The concept of trust has become central to discussions about the future of automated systems. This chapter interrogates how trust, as an anticipatory category, is associated with future ambitions for Automated Decision-Making (ADM) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) within research and innovation narratives about how to accrue the supposed benefits of future technologies. For industry and policy stakeholders, and in academic disciplines such as human-computer interaction, computer science and engineering disciplines, ethics and subsequently trustworthiness can be designed in automated technologies themselves. As part of a digital capitalist innovation agenda, trust is thus conceptualised as the outcome of technological innovation and the production of ethical machines. In contrast, in design anthropology, trust is seen as emergent from the contingent circumstances of the everyday and inextricable from everyday ethics. Subsequently we need to re-define and re-engage anticipatory categories and concepts associated with automation in order to restructure and revise the terms of interdisciplinary collaboration to account for everyday ethics.