Lay trust in expert systems founders when experts’ own ignorance surfaces

Evidence

Widespread lay knowledge of modern risk environments leads to awareness of the limits of expertise and forms one of the “public relations” problems that has to be faced by those who seek to sustain lay trust in expert systems. The faith that supports trust in expert systems involves a blocking off of the ignorance of the lay person when faced with the claims of expertise; but realisation of the areas of ignorance which confront the experts themselves, as individual practitioners and in terms of overall fields of knowledge, may weaken or undermine that faith on the part of lay individuals. Experts often take risks “on behalf” of lay clients while concealing, or fudging over, the true nature of those risks or even the fact that there are risks at all. More damaging than the lay discovery of this kind of concealment is the circumstance where the full extent of a particular set of dangers and the risks associated with them is not realised by the experts. For in this case what is in question is not only the limits of, or the gaps in, expert knowledge, but an inadequacy which compromises the very idea of expertise. — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 316

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the reader’s thesis: Stevens’s trust in Darlington as the ‘great gentleman’ expert fails because the institution’s own moral ignorance, not just concealment, undermines the idea of expertise. — connects to: Controlling system trust becomes the exclusive work of experts; Reputation substitutes for truth in scientific and cognitive contexts; Even pragmatic faith in expert systems still implies trust — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 77 (+3 more)
• QUESTION: Is Ishiguro showing the expert system’s ignorance (Darlington genuinely not realizing the danger of appeasement) as the most damaging failure — matching this precisely?

Related

• Even pragmatic faith in expert systems still implies trust (similarity 0.82)
• Controlling system trust becomes the exclusive work of experts (similarity 0.80)
• Confidence in expert systems can be catastrophically misplaced (similarity 0.79)
• Reputation substitutes for truth in scientific and cognitive contexts (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Confidence in expert systems can be catastrophically misplaced #expands (0.45) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 13