Trust and Regulation: An Analysis of Emotion

Abstract

In the contemporary regulatory discourse, much energy is directed to ensuring and governing trustworthy technology, or exploring how trust in recipient communities makes technological advances more palatable. This paper works well beyond these approaches to trust. Commencing with Cotterrell’s vision of community as relationships of trust, we argue to locate AI within communities, thereby positioning technology as an active participant in the initiation and maintenance of these social bonds of mutual trust. To achieve this transformation, the analysis focuses on AI ethics as geared towards trust building in the creation and deployment of AI-assisted technologies. By understanding the indicative role of emotions in influencing ethical decision-making and stimulating shared trust, AI ethics formulation and associated decision-making process across the AI ecosystem are re-grounded back into recipient communities. The presence of trust can be seen as an emergent quality reflecting healthy social bonding, more than a context for or outcome of ethical compliance. In this analysis, trust is a regulatory force pre-determining and directing the communal relationships between humans and machines.

Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic, Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, Trust, Emotions, Affective Community, Moral Philosophy