sometimes being perverse, one day we are sure to meet a penguin. From the movies, we know they can dance, but can they fly? Well, we now have to change our ontology to say that not all birds fly. So, we have to retract an existing assumption and replace it by a new one. Learning, as we can see, is not only about adding knowledge. It’s also about changing or sometime even invalidating previous knowledge. Now we are faced with a new situation; that of realizing that our knowledge is subject to doubt. This leads us once again to trust.

Trust and Content

As we’ve seen, any content needs to be associated with a level of trust. Whether it is human or computer knowledge, there must be a mechanism to say whether that information is understood such that certain actions can be undertaken with some expectation of the outcome of the action. Alternatively, we need to understand whether the information is not fully understood and that other actions are needed with some alternate expectation of an outcome. Trust is the measure of how well we understand the information such that we can expect a specific outcome from an action with some degree of certainty. Of course, trust as we have defined it is a gradient that ranges from no trust at all to complete trust. Here, we need to make a point; complete trust is a religious concept. At this point, we can come back to our famed sentence “This sentence is false.” We were observing that humans can process this sentence without difficulty whereas it is seemingly a big problem for a computer. Now, imagine that just as humans have a mechanism to evaluate every piece of knowledge and assign to it a level of trust, before processing, computers would look at every piece of data they have in the same way. When presented with “This sentence is false.” the computer would first evaluate its chance of processing it. If it accepts that sentence blindly, it will go in an unending spin. However, if it approaches it with caution, which is with less than complete trust, it may recognize readily that it should be careful and stop processing at once; in case of further uncertainty, it may decide to limit the time it allocates to processing it. That’s a small illustration of the concept of trust, and we’ll go into it more depth in the next chapter.

The emergence of personal electronic devices centered on secure cores in the commercial marketplace can be illustrated through a number of distinct case studies. In each case, the reason for success or failure can typically be traced to two characteristics of the situation. One characteristic is common across all cases and one characteristic is similar, but just a bit different in each case. The common characteristic is the fact that deployment incurs an infrastructure problem that is generally best solved by a large scale system deployment through which the personal electronic device infrastructure can be added at the ground floor in the development of the full system. The similar, but just a little bit unique characteristic is of course, money.

It is worth noting that these success stories all have the common theme that they illustrate personal electronic devices very much as an emergence species of computer; specifically, taking their secure core as a starting point. None of the stories center on the more significant features of complex social ecosystems that we think are the future of personal electronic devices, or whatever their descendent species offspring might be called. The cases are of interest, however, because they at least give us a view of the concepts, albeit operating at the technical edges of social orders.

The first large scale deployment of a phone card based system was undertaken by France Telecom during the early 1980’s. The overarching system of concern was the deployment of pay telephones throughout France. The point of concern was the prospect of fraud in the handling of large amounts of currency in the form of coins. The fraud could take a variety of forms; fraud in the

Book available at Midori Press (regular)
Book available at Midori Press (signed)
Book available at Amazon (regular)