The coming world of autonomous machines will transform how we live, travel, work and engage with the world. Industry – from agriculture and infrastructure to logistics – looks set to enjoy incredible commercial opportunities. Businesses will benefit from augmentation of human effort that could improve safety, productivity, efficiency, comfort and more. But there’s a big question here: how can we trust the intelligence behind it?
Trust is a fascinating, multi-dimensional topic, with both objective (using high rigour disciplines) and subjective (human behaviour) perspectives. Assurances can be given on each dimension, giving us confidence in how a system should behave in any event, and in a way that is not only safe but in keeping with what humans reasonably expect of that machine at any given time.
Nevertheless, challenges remain – and the largest and most dangerous tend to be systemic. This is the result of many factors: complexity, connectivity (which...