Stephen Downes

I said the other day that another word for 'cognitive offloading' might be 'trust'. We don't manually check everything the AI does because we trust it to do (more or less) the right thing. So the title of this post caught my eye; Josh Brake summarizes and to a degree endorses Stephen M. R. Covey's book The Speed of Trust. "Covey decomposes trust into two main elements: character and competence... character, he argues, is composed of integrity and intent... competence can similarly be decomposed into two pieces, capability and results." These all together represent "a strong foundation of character" that ought to be instilled in students, suggests Brake. But is it a good account of trust? I don't think so, because truth is a much broader concept. We can trust things that are not human and do not possess virtue or intent: trust the math, trust the process, trust the ice, trust in the future. Trust isn't a property of the thing being trusted, it is a willingness on our side to grant certain expectations to it regarding the outcome.