C2025-07

AI and the Trust Revolution How Technology Is Transforming Human Connections Yasmin Green and Gillian Tett July 7, 2025 A robot at an economic conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, June 2025 A robot at an economic conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, June 2025 Anton Vaganov / Reuters YASMIN GREEN is CEO of Jigsaw, Google’s technology incubator. She is Co-Chair of the Aspen Cybersecurity Group and serves on the board of the Anti-Defamation League.

GILLIAN TETT is Provost of King’s College Cambridge and a columnist at the Financial Times.

More by Yasmin Green More by Gillian Tett Listen Share & Download Print Save When experts worry about young people’s relationship with information online, they typically assume that young people are not as media literate as their elders. But ethnographic research conducted by Jigsaw—Google’s technology incubator—reveals a more complex and subtle reality: members of Gen Z, typically understood to be people born after 1997 and before 2012, have developed distinctly different strategies for evaluating information online, ones that would bewilder anyone over 30. They do not consume news as their elders would—namely, by first reading a headline and then the story. They do typically read the headlines first, but then they jump to the online comments associated with the article, and only afterward delve into the body of the news story. That peculiar tendency is revealing. Young people do not trust that a story is credible simply because an expert, editorial gatekeeper, or other authority figure endorses it; they prefer to consult a crowd of peers to assess its trustworthiness. Even as young people mistrust institutions and figures of authority, the era of the social web allows them to repose their trust in the anonymous crowd.

A subsequent Jigsaw study in the summer of 2023, following the release of the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT, explored how members of Gen Z in India and the United States use AI chatbots. The study found that young people were quick to consult the chatbots for medical advice, relationship counseling, and stock tips, since they thought that AI was easy to access, would not judge them, and was responsive to their personal needs—and that, in many of these respects, AI advice was better than advice they received from humans. In another study, the consulting firm Oliver Wyman found a similar pattern: as many as 39 percent of Gen Z employees around the world would prefer to have an AI colleague or manager instead of a human one; for Gen Z workers in the United States, that figure is 36 percent. A quarter of all employees in the United States feel the same way, suggesting that these attitudes are not only the province of the young.

Such findings challenge conventional notions about the importance and sanctity of interpersonal interactions. Many older observers lament the rise of chatbots, seeing the new technology as guilty of atomizing people and alienating them from larger society, encouraging a growing distance between individuals and a loss of respect for authority. But seen another way, the behavior and preferences of Gen Z also point to something else: a reconfiguration of trust that carries some seeds of hope.

Analysts are thinking about trust incorrectly. The prevailing view holds that trust in societal institutions is crumbling in Western countries today, a mere two percent of Americans say they trust Congress, for example, compared with 77 percent six decades ago; although 55 percent of Americans trusted the media in 1999, only 32 percent do so today. Indeed, earlier this year, the pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson concluded that “what unites us [Americans], increasingly, is what we distrust.”

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But such data tells only half the tale. The picture does seem dire if viewed through the twentieth-century lens of traditional polling that asks people how they feel about institutions and authority figures. But look through an anthropological or ethnographic lens—tracking what people do rather than what they simply tell pollsters—and a very different picture emerges. Trust is not necessarily disappearing in the modern world; it’s migrating. With each new technological innovation, people are turning away from traditional structures of authority and toward the crowd, the amorphous but very real world of people and information just a few taps away.

This shift poses big dangers; the mother of a Florida teenager who committed suicide in 2024 filed a lawsuit accusing an AI company’s chatbots of encouraging her son to take his own life. But the shift could also deliver benefits. Although people who are not digital natives might consider it risky to trust a bot, the fact is that many in Gen Z seem to think that it is as risky (if not riskier) to trust human authority figures. If AI tools are designed carefully, they might potentially help—not harm—interpersonal interactions: they can serve as mediators, helping polarized groups communicate better with one another; they can potentially counter conspiracy theories more effectively than human authority figures; they can also provide a sense of agency to people who are suspicious of human experts. The challenge for policymakers, citizens, and tech companies alike is to recognize how the nature of trust is evolving and then design AI tools and policies in response to this transformation. Younger generations will not act like their elders, and it is unwise to ignore the tremendous change they are ushering in.

TRUST FALL Trust is a basic human need: it glues people and groups together and is the foundation for democracy, markets, and most aspects of social life today. It operates in several forms. The first and simplest type of trust is that between individuals, the face-to-face knowledge that often binds small groups together through direct personal links. Call this “eye-contact trust.” It is found in most nonindustrialized settings (of the sort often studied by anthropologists) and also in the industrialized world (among groups of friends, colleagues, schoolmates, and family members).

When groups grow big, however, face-to-face interactions become insufficient. As Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary biologist, has noted, the number of people a human brain can genuinely know is limited; Dunbar reckoned the number was around 150. “Vertical trust” was the great innovation of the last few millennia, allowing larger societies to function through institutions such as governments, capital markets, the academy, and organized religion. These rules-based, collective, norm-enforcing, resource-allocating systems shape how and where people direct their trust.

The digitization of society over the past two decades has enabled a new paradigm shift beyond eye-contact and vertical trust to what the social scientist Rachel Botsman calls “distributed trust,” or large-scale, peer-to-peer interactions. That is because the Internet enables interactions between groups without eye contact. For the first time, complete strangers can coordinate with one another for travel through an app such as Airbnb, trade through eBay, entertain one another by playing multiplayer video games such as Fortnite, and even find love through sites such as Match.com.

To some, these connections might seem untrustworthy, since it is easy to create fake digital personas, and no single authority exists to impose and enforce rules online. But many people nevertheless act as if they do trust the crowd, partly because mechanisms have arisen that bolster trust, such as social media profiles, “friending,” crowd affirmation tools, and online peer reviews that provide some version of oversight. Consider the ride-sharing app Uber. Two decades ago, it would have seemed inconceivable to build a taxi service that encourages strangers to get into one another’s private cars; people did not trust strangers in that way. But today, millions do that, not just because people trust Uber, as an institution, but because a peer-to-peer ratings system—the surveillance of the crowd—reassures both passengers and drivers. Over time and with the impetus of new technology, trust patterns can shift.

NO JUDGMENT AI offers a new twist in this tale, one that could be understood as a novel form of trust. The technology has long been quietly embedded in daily lives, in tools such as spell checkers and spam filters. But the recent emergence of generative AI marks a distinct shift. AI systems now boast sophisticated reasoning and can act as agents, executing complex tasks autonomously. This sounds terrifying to some; indeed, an opinion poll from Pew suggests that only 24 percent of Americans think that AI will benefit them, and 43 percent expect to see it “harm” them.

But American attitudes toward AI are not universally shared. A 2024 Ipsos poll found that although around two-thirds of adults in Australia, Canada, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States agreed that AI “makes them nervous,” a mere 29 percent of Japanese adults shared that view, as did only around 40 percent of adults in Indonesia, Poland, and South Korea. And although only about a third of people in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States agreed that they were excited about AI, almost half of people in Japan and three-quarters in South Korea and Indonesia did.

Meanwhile, although people in Europe and North America tell pollsters that they fear AI, they constantly use it for complex tasks in their lives, such as getting directions with maps, identifying items while shopping, and fine-tuning writing. Convenience is one reason: getting hold of a human doctor can take a long time, but AI bots are always available. Customization is another

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1 Als daders van een strafbaar feit worden gestraft:

1° zij die het feit plegen, doen plegen of medeplegen;

2° zij die door giften, beloften, misbruik van gezag, geweld, bedreiging, of misleiding of door het verschaffen van gelegenheid, middelen of inlichtingen het feit opzettelijk uitlokken.

2 Ten aanzien van de laatsten komen alleen die handelingen in aanmerking die zij opzettelijk hebben uitgelokt, benevens hun gevolgen.