How to use this map
IMMERSE yourself in the seven future forces
transforming the landscape of trust across our
business, civic, and social spheres.
UNCOVER the changing building blocks of trust that will
yield new challenges and possibilities for how we share
information, make agreements, build community, and wield
power in the coming decade.
EXPLORE four models of trust that leverage familiar
strategies with new tools and practices to help you anticipate
risk and clarify action in an era of heightened uncertainty,
ambiguity, and possibility.
DIVE deeper into the four trust models with our
companion workbook that includes full-length
scenarios for filtering, outsourcing, verifying, and
boundary building between now and 2028.
3 | Validating Provenance and Authenticity
High-value assets such as art and exotic raw materials
will be tagged with sensors and tracked through supply
chains, allowing stakeholders to verify provenance
and reduce tampering, counterfeiting, and insurance
fraud. Such tools could be used to ensure food safety
or transparency in global trading. As it becomes easier
to manipulate ways we communicate and share data,
blockchain-based tools will become increasingly critical
for coordination and collaboration.
1 | Extreme Impacts of Information Insecurity
Security challenges—from human errors to unforeseen
technical vulnerabilities—will continue to make
digital communication subject to exploitation. These
weaknesses will be exacerbated by the speed with which
information can spread and affect real-world outcomes,
creating an environment in which seemingly benign
mistakes can create huge impacts, and renewing fears
about sharing and exchanging sensitive information.
2 | A (Dis)information Arms Race
Monetizing billions of viewers through advertising
underscores a critical dilemma—social networks need
attention to drive revenue, regardless of external costs.
Attention hacking will be exacerbated by advances in
machine learning systems that automatically generate
information intended to deceive and spread. Coupled
with tools to manipulate video and audio in seemingly
authentic ways, an explosion of machine-generated
content will aim to maximally engage audiences.
3 | New Interfaces to Navigate
As questions swirl around the integrity of information
technologies, emerging interfaces—from immersive,
augmented reality platforms to sophisticated, voice-
based systems—will require mastering new platforms
and meeting continued information challenges. From
questions about product advertising to obviously
contentious issues around who owns the digital
information layer over physical space, we’ll need
models for ensuring the utility, quality, and validity
of information in these new interfaces.
1 | Trusting Without Authority
A contract’s authenticity rests on trust in its issuing authority.
But problems arise if a deed’s owner has little control over
who accesses it or if data on proprietary databases is hacked.
Blockchains will enable owners to store their own documents
and decide who has access. Documents on blockchains will be
used in zero-knowledge proofs and smart contracts that enable
information to be verified without being viewed.
2 | Digitally Enforcing Laws
Embedding code into physical objects is becoming a regulatory
mechanism. Early versions of embedded governance—such as
cameras at stoplights—are giving way to sophisticated smart
contracts. Anyone can implement self-enforcing laws and
agreements for any purpose. Although such innovations have
potential to transform the nature of enforcement, they’ll demand
a level of transparency and explicitness that isn’t always
consistent with law enforcement.
1 | Smart Contracts, Smart Bombs
Blockchain-based technologies face the same misuses as
other digital technologies, becoming part of criminal and
government arsenals. The ability of smart contracts to
carry out programmatic functions when certain conditions
are met will combine with acts of digital terrorism, ranging
from crypto-locker attacks to weaponizing Internet of
Things devices. Time bomb malware will increasingly
contain an element to activate its malicious payload under
precise conditions.
2 | Inconvenient Reality Blocked
As mixed-reality technologies move to the market, online
information warfare will proliferate. An unfiltered mixed-
reality future will be filled with advertisements—and tools
to block advertising and other unwanted online content.
Anything politically or morally suspect could be censored
from the user’s view of the mixed-reality world. Face
recognition technology will make it possible to filter out
not just unwanted ideas but also those who hold them.
3 | Weaponization of Deep Learning
The Politically and socially disruptive advertising the
Russian government deployed on Facebook and other
social media platforms was actually quite crude, relying
on blunt images and terms intended to elicit a reaction
from narrow target audiences. The next step will be to use
deep learning algorithms to determine the epigenome of
beliefs and target not simply surface-level opinions, but
underlying values and norms as well.
2 | Monitoring Access and Violations
Data often contradicts service claims, particularly in speed
and throughput statements of internet service providers.
Tools testing whether a provider is throttling some services, in
violation of network neutrality, will continue to grow in popularity
and expand to include tests of other kinds of restrictions.
Beyond contentious debates around network access, we’ll
see similar questions concerning access and validity of
information that comes across our digital networks.
3 | Circumventing Legacy Systems
Peer-to-peer networks are changing our relationship to basic
infrastructure, from utilities to biotech drugs. Some utilities
have reduced rates paid to solar customers, undermining
economic support. As battery technology improves, the
viability of disconnecting from the grid will increase, along with
efforts to make this impractical. In response to pharmaceutical
companies buying low-volume legacy drugs and raising prices
dramatically, medical associations will work together with
generic drug manufacturers to provide alternatives.
1 | Interacting with Autonomous Infrastructure
Self-driving vehicles are increasing in complexity and likely
to be abundant by 2030. In autonomous vehicle software,
the distinction between hands-on and hands-off autonomy
is critical. But for human drivers, more telling change will
occur with no human controls. As our infrastructure becomes
autonomous and mobile, we’ll face vital questions about how
to coexist and interact with machines that act on their own.
1 | Formalizing Non-Geographic Communities
Markers of opportunity and community are coming
untethered from geography as telecommuting increases and
services are consumed globally. Still, we need community
within our physical space. Cities are good places to find
jobs and tribes, but telepresence tech, automated transport,
and online affinity groups encourage people to develop
communities beyond urban centers. We’ll see peripheral
urbanization, with suburbs outside urban hubs optimized for
community values.
2 | Communing with Computers
As intelligent machines communicate more intuitively,
gaining power to trigger action in the world, they’ll assume
more prominent roles in communities, becoming caregivers,
mediators, and officers. What forms robots take and
how they’re accepted will vary by culture and geography
worldwide. As technologies become more powerful and
adaptable, our cultural perspectives will continue to diverge,
with communities incorporating bots in vastly different ways.
3 | Proliferating Measurements of Community Health
Increasingly we look beyond traditional economic metrics
to understand and quantify how communities shape
experience, looking instead to metrics like happiness, health,
and trust. Each category can become a source of contention
and focused action, from decreasing junk food access to
creating chemical-free communities. As differing categories
emerge and gain traction, they’ll reshape questions around
access, funding, and who is and is not part of a group.
BLURRING INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSIBILITIES
AND BOUNDARIES
Who makes the rules?
Factors that connect people globally are remaking how we relate to each other. Edelman’s 2017
Trust Barometer showed trust in government, media, corporations, and NGOs in worldwide
decline. Corporations are being disrupted by the platform economy, and governmental
agreements are being pushed aside. Technology companies have become de facto arbiters of
global speech, private companies have been targets of cybercrimes by state actors, and US cities
and states are committing to treaties that directly contradict federal policy. Enforcement of rules is
up for grabs as blockchain advances are effectively turning code into law.
COMPETING IN EXTREME ECONOMIES WITH
EXTREME DISPARITIES
As the disparity between winning and losing continues to grow, how do we operate without
vilifying one another and undermining our mutual security?
Declining distribution costs and accelerating product cycles are supercharging global markets,
creating extreme winners and losers. Newspapers and information companies have spent years
in free fall due in part to the success of Facebook, Google, and others in dominating the global
information landscape. This example highlights the extreme competition in fields like machine
learning, where the costs of achieving global scale are trivial. With talent wars raging at every
scale of society, countries like China are turning the pursuit of machine learning talent into a
national priority, and startups with deep pockets are purchasing university departments.
BREAKING OLD MODELS WITH
NEW SCIENCE REVOLUTIONS
What principles will emerge to guide our use of new scientific capacities to alter biological
and physical systems at global scales?
Expanding capabilities to manipulate everything from microscale biology to global climate are
challenging trust models and raising old questions about just how much humans should alter
the natural world. Rapid advances have given us practical tools to access and understand
human systems, and breakthroughs in brain-to-computer interfaces are moving toward
commercialization. Bypassing human trials, biohackers have begun using CRISPR to alter their
DNA. And advances in geoengineering with potential to address the impacts of climate change
are renewing discussion—and creating confusion—around how to manage global efforts to
manipulate climate.
SHIFTING AUTHORITIES AND EVIDENCE
Can we believe what we read, see, and hear?
The last decade was driven by the rise of big data, and the next will be remade by back-end
systems transforming data into valuable insight with limited human involvement. Already, machine
learning systems make decisions for us from medical diagnoses to hiring. Increasingly high-stakes
outcomes are shaped by insight humans didn’t generate and may not even be able to understand.
These systems are creating intuitive leaps and valuable insights beyond human capacity. With
the information environment increasingly polluted by intentional misinformation—threatening the
quality of automated analysis—it will be harder for humans to act on incoming data.
FRAGMENTING IDENTITY AND
EPHEMERAL COMMUNITIES
Which identities will fragment and what new categories will determine who’s in and out?
We’re witnessing a transformation of default identities through massive demographic shifts in
birth rates, migration, and aging. Such quantitative shifts are accompanied by a reinvention of the
concept of identity, as categories of race, sexual orientation, gender, and culture are becoming
more fluid and mixed, empowering people to self-identify with a much wider set of mutable
identities. Meanwhile, global interconnection is helping more people seek out and connect with
others like themselves while amplifying group tensions and anxieties. This fragmentation will
play out in all spheres of human activity and challenge the basis of legal, political, and other
institutional systems built on conferring rights to hard identity categories.
MANIPULATING PERCEPTIONS AND PERSUASION
How can we ethically harness emerging understandings of human decision-making
to balance skepticism and trust?
Fields like psychology and behavioral economics have upended understandings of how people
make evaluations and decisions. This process will accelerate as advances in neuroimaging
bring transparency into how our brains formulate trust and decompose meaningful distinctions
between cognitive processing of trust and distrust. New understandings—coupled with ongoing
improvements in the ability to target people with ads and information—will create radical new
capabilities to influence perceptions, emotions, and decisions. Setting aside intentional deception,
extreme targeting has as much potential to persuade and create confusion, fatigue, and
overwhelm as to engage.
COLLABORATING WITH NONHUMAN ACTORS
How will humans coexist with machine actors that are quickly becoming our managers,
collaborators, and surrogates?
Machine intelligence shapes us in unseen ways, turning machines into actors in business, social,
and civic spheres. Robust networks of intelligent things will take open-ended action based on
rules designed for human actors and social systems. Already, jobs are getting unbundled into
tasks to be routed, tracked, and reassembled into value by algorithmic managers. In the world
of autonomous cars, governments are remaking the rules of the road for nonhuman drivers—
a development rapidly infiltrating other domains. Shopping bots are snatching up hot tickets,
reselling them at huge markups, and televisions are intelligently breaking the law to bypass
regulatory tests.
Building Blocks
Making new systems of trust
Over the next decade, many of the basic building blocks we use to create
trust—INFORMATION we’re exposed to and seek out, COMMUNITY networks
we interact with daily, INFRASTRUCTURE we rely on to activate our plans,
AGREEMENTS we make and ask of others, and POWER structures that
shape or constrain our behavior—will be reshaped by the seven future forces
described earlier.
theatlantic.com theverge.com kotaku.com
theatlantic.com
goldenvisas.com cnn.com theatlantic.com fusion.kinja.com
techrepublic.com arstechnica.com spectrum.ieee.org bgr.com
venturebeat.com
maersk.com wired.com en.wikipedia.org
pcgamer.com
fcc.gov
WHAT IS ZCASH?
Shielded transactions
hide the sender, recipient,
and value on the blockchain
INFORMATION: An era of abundance and noise
The internet has brought seemingly contradictory phenomena. We’ve gained transparency in
countless domains, yet the climate for trusting what we read and hear is noisier than ever. We
connect more easily, but these connections can produce greater isolation and tribalism. In part,
contradictions emerge due to the sheer abundance and persistence of information. We haven’t
yet learned how to manage a world in which every message is stored and facts and falsehoods
are equally accessible.
COMMUNITY: Defining who and what belongs
The ways we form communities are changing, as are the value and benefits we expect communities
to provide. With so many options, we’ll experience new anxieties around who and where community
members reside, how to measure and manage our shared spaces, and welcome intelligent machines
as peers in unprecedented ways. As these forces reshape the role of community in our lives, trust will
take center stage in future communities we form.
Citizenship for Sale
Estonia, Spain, and other countries sell
virtual citizenship, providing access to
passports and other rights.
Objects as Witnesses
Arkansas police issued a warrant to access
an alleged murderer’s Amazon Echo record-
ings, fueling debate about privacy legislation.
Global Trade
IBM and Maersk partnered on a
blockchain-based joint venture aimed
at creating distributed mechanisms for
tracking routes of goods.
Viral Criminals
North Korea spread the WannaCry
crypto-locker virus, using tools developed
by and stolen from the US National
Security Agency.
Great Firewall
China restricts its internet, censors websites,
and blocks foreign products, giving its people
the least online freedom on the planet.
Fake Comments
Spambots corrupted the FCC’s comment
process for net neutrality, including
comments from former President Obama
and deceased citizens.
Hospital Drugs
Responding to shortages and price gouging,
four large US hospital systems have banded
together to produce affordable generics.
Verified, Not Viewed
ZCash cryptocurrency uses a zero-
knowledge proof that validates transactions
without sharing the details with third parties.
Speed on Autopilot
Tesla changed positions on whether its
autopilot slightly exceeds the speed limit
versus strictly conforming to limits.
Rise of the Robocops
Dubai hopes to improve trust by recruiting
robots to make up 25% of its police force
by 2030.
Food Deserts and Swamps
Public health researchers identify communities
oversupplied with junk food as food swamps.
INFRASTRUCTURE: Relying on complex systems
We’ve come to trust our infrastructure to work and our resources—from energy to medicine—to remain
sufficient. Ramping up system complexity adds to the nature of this trust, as we understand less about
how autonomous systems work and question whether trust is warranted. We’re moving toward an
interconnected world that simultaneously demands greater trust and relies on external verification.
The penalty for trust violations, from net neutrality to legacy drugs, can be dropping out of the system.
Pedestrians Undetected
Video of a self-driving Volvo hitting
pedestrians went viral after built-in safety
systems failed to stop the car.
Managing Human Error
The phishing of John Podesta’s email
was traced to a typo calling a suspect link
“legitimate,” not “illegitimate.”
The Rise of Deepfakes
A group of anonymous Reddit users
developed open-source tools for deepfakes,
superimposing celebrities’ faces onto
pornographic videos.
Augmented Activism
LGBT activists took over naming the
Westboro Church within Pokemon Go,
signaling augmented reality as a future
battleground.
POWER: New ways to force action
Forms of power vary over time, as does our ability to counter unfamiliar expressions of power,
whether in diplomacy or propaganda. Variances come from evolutions of forms—from muskets to
automatic weapons—and from new ways to exercise power, recently in cyberwarfare, hacking, and
mixed reality. If power is a performance, its success or failure is meaningful for those bearing witness
and those taking part. Altering witnesses’ perceptions may be more important than actual outcomes.
AGREEMENTS: Distributing and automating enforcement
We’ve developed systems and institutions to ensure people carry out agreements or face
consequences. Recently, highly distributed databases known as blockchains have enabled
ways to automatically execute and enforce contracts. These platforms for decentralized, open,
trustless systems allow permissionless innovation—such as self-executing contracts, new forms
of authentication, peer-to-peer interaction, and self-sovereign identity. Blockchain technologies
will create new efficiencies and opportunities to broker agreements while raising questions
about how to enforce them and ensure security.
Whether shopping for a favorite brand of baby food,
diagnosing a perceived illness, or deciding where to
invest, issues of trust emerge at every step. To guide our
decision-making we rely on credible sources of information,
enforceable contracts and guarantees, and communities of
individuals whose life experiences are comparable to our own.
Since the earliest efforts to organize human societies, we’ve
modeled trust from these building blocks of our society.
Today, as our services and interactions reach across
the globe through complex digital networks, the
bedrock of trust is eroding. Beyond widespread
questions about fake news and a post-truth society,
we find a more profound set of technological, social,
and institutional transformations disrupting the
landscape of trust by upending the foundations of
our institutions and authority structures across the
business, civic, and social spheres.
To help you navigate these risks and uncertainties,
we’ve identified seven future forces reshaping our
familiar building blocks of trust. From the rise of
nonhuman actors to revolutions in biological science,
the emerging landscape will challenge us to remodel
trust to build, maintain, and communicate with our
partners, neighbors, and customers.
In the coming decade, will we primarily filter
distractions and viewpoints to keep out ideas and
actors that conflict with our sense of identity and
meaning? Outsource the burden of decision-making
to smart objects and authorities? Leverage the ongoing
flood of data to continuously verify the information
behind our decisions? Or reinforce physical and
digital boundaries to define who is in and out of
our trusted networks?
As the future unfolds, how will we remodel trust
to anticipate risk and clarify action?
Future Forces
Reshaping trust across the business, civic, and social spheres
As we grapple with increasing tensions around trust in the coming decade,
external forces will challenge the kinds of evidence we use and compound the
many risks we have to navigate, confronting us with the need to remodel trust
for a rapidly changing and complex environment.
For more information:
Sean Ness | [email protected]g
201 Hamilton Avenue | Palo Alto, CA 94301
650.854.6322 | www.iftf.org
YEARS
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