Technology and Trust

We think of trust as the animating spirit of a prosperous society. Trust makes promises workable, credit extendable and contracts reasonable. If you try to make trust dispensable through a system of fail-safe controls, you end up with a stultifyingly cumbersome apparatus, and the cost of handling things would exceed the price of producing them. If there is no trust at all in the person who is buying a 50p ballpoint pen, you have to frisk the person to make sure he or she is not planning a hold-up, ascertain their identity by checking their fingerprint or retina, get at least three independent checks on their credit worthiness or, if they want to pay cash, make sure through careful analysis that their money is not counterfeit. and before he or she leaves the store, you have to make sure they are not taking anything from the store, except the ballpoint pen, which now costs £2.50