Introduction: Bringing Together Humans and Artificial Agents in Cyber-Societies: A New field of Trust Research

摘要

Humans have learned to cooperate in many ways and environments; on different tasks; and for achieving different goals. Collaboration and cooperation in their more general sense (and in particular: negotiation, exchange, help, delegation, adoption, and so on) are an important characteristic - or better, one of the foundational aspects - of human societies. In the evolution of cooperative models diverse constructs of various kinds (e.g. purely interactional, technical-legal, organizational, socio-cognitive, etc.), have been opportunely introduced or spontaneously emerged to support decision making in collaborative situations. The new scenario we are going to meet in the third millennium transfigures the old frame of reference, in that we have to consider: new channels and infrastructures (i.e. Internet); new artificial entities for cooperating with (artificial or software agents); new modalities of interaction (suggested/imposed by both the new channels and the new entities). Thus, it will be necessary to update the traditional supporting decision making constructs. This effort will be necessary especially to develop the new cyber-societies in such a way as not to miss some of the important cooperative characteristics which are so relevant in human societies. Trust, in the general frame above described, might be considered as a socio-cognitive construct of main importance. In particular, trust building is now recognized as a key factor for using and developing the new interactional paradigm.