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Input: In her witty new book Australian technology author and TED celebrity Rachel Botsman tells us why it did not work. Who Can You Trust? How Technology Brought Us Together and Why It Could Drive Us Apart might be a bit too perky for some but it reveals some deep truths.
With industrial power collapsed  social media’s “distributed trust” began its run to win popular trust.  Botsman  even claims to have predicted the next stage of evolution  anticipating Airbnb  Zipcar and Uber in  her  previous book. At first the masses took to social technology like ducks to water but few thought through the costs of power flowing from institutional experts to less sophisticated individuals. It turned out that these social media had institutions too  if less hierarchical  but still leading to someone at the top with a great degree of control over the people’s “open” media below them.
 Botsman  says  she  would not have written  her  book if  she  did not think distributed networks could solve many problems and develop popular trust  but the many examples presented in  her  book demonstrate that “distributed trust always seem to lead us back to centralized power ” with Facebook  Amazon  and Alibaba leading the list.
 Her  thesis is that distributed systems need to know who is telling the truth in order to be social but their media technology develop so fast and anonymously it becomes difficult to trace accountability. Perhaps 75 percent of automobiles will self-drive by 2040. How can sufficient trust develop in such a major activity in such a short time? Blockchains like Bitcoin may replace governmental currency and financial transactions. Robots threaten to take everyone’s job. The most famous bot was HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey and we all know what happened then. Some “trust pause” will certainly be necessary for such major social transitions.
Take the number one social media technology guy  Mark Zuckerberg  who created Facebook to be an open forum for public discussion. Yet  after social media was accused of biasing the presidential election even  he  had to reluctantly concede (the second time) that there was an abundance of fake news on  his  site  which  he  then promised to fix in a socially positive way.  His  solution was to balance alternative views by adding “additional perspectives ” including noting after doubtful material that fact checkers disputed the claims in the original published news. But who would do the “fact checking”?
 Botsman  does not mention  it  but Google’s top scientist Ray Kurzweil had bigger ideas. Computers would be thinking for themselves by 2014 with humans becoming immortal soon after. Humans would become immortal under Kurzweil’s Calico project to replicate nature’s control of mitochondrial DNA by moving toxic bacteria into the cell nucleus to stop aging. With age under control people would live forever. At the same time  artificial intelligence would develop computers that learn by themselves. Ageless individuals could then link an AI machine to their brain so they could give accurate and immediate responses to every kind of question. But if this takes place instantly  is that a person still a person or a computer?
China’s Social Credit System would produce a “social credit score” for every Chinese citizen and introduce national networks of shame to ameliorate and control unruly segments of the population. This system should have a bullish future in much of the world now under authoritarian governments.  Botsman  quips: “Today China  tomorrow a place near you.”
Not a place in the U.S. with its democratic government protecting privacy  right? One big obstacle to such protection mentioned by  Botsman  is that government regulation simply cannot keep up with the explosive rate of change in private social media technology. There is that free speech and press stuff but Congress just approved another renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act seventeen years after 9/11 and few doubt that some similar future horrendous terrorist act would make the government’s surveillance even more intrusive.
 Botsman ’s general solution to increase social trust is to rely upon reputation  which is sound  but extremely difficult to evaluate as  her  book proves.
How do we even know if  Botsman  isn’t a bot already  predicting China for us all?

A Chinese Social Media Credit System for Us All