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Today, Apple’s Siri, Google’s Now, Amazon’s Echo, IBM’s Watson, and other cognitive tools are beginning to reach a level of utility that provides a foundation for a new generation of cognitive collaborators and cognitive assistants (CAs) (Siddike & Kohda, 2018a; 2018b; 2018c; Siddike, Spohrer, Demirkhan, and Kohda, Siddike, Spohrer, Demirkhan, & Kohda, 2018a; 2018b; Spohrer & Banavar, 2015). CAs are new decision tools that can augment human capabilities and expertise in understanding the environment around us with depth and clarity (Siddike, Iwano, Hidaka, Kohda, & Spohrer, 2017; Spohrer, 2016; Spohrer, Bassano, Piciocchi, & Siddike, 2017; Spohrer, Siddike, & Kohda, 2017). CAs can provide people with high-quality recommendations and help them make better data-driven decisions (Demirkan et al., 2015). Trust is an important and essential issue to consider for CAs to be adopted by society. The progression from cognitive tool to assistant to collaborator to coach to mediator is in fact a progression of trust (Siddike et al., 2018a; 2018b).
In the 19th century, people did not trust steam engines and “boilers.” The problem was that they often exploded. Over time, design and engineering improved, trust went up, and economic growth resulted (Siddike & Kohda, 2018c). For example, consider this one application of the steam engine in America (Arthur, 2011); in 1850, a decade before the Civil War, the United States’ economy was small—it was not much bigger than Italy’s. Forty years later, it was the largest economy in the world. What happened in between was the railroads (Arthur, 2011). In the 21st century, people do not fully trust CAs. Knowledge, technology, and organizations are three ways people augment themselves to become smarter (Norman, 1993). However, knowledge, technology, and organizations must be trusted to spur economic growth. Advanced cognitive systems must become trusted social entities to be effective in our culture (Forbus, 2016). Only as trusted social entities can cognitive systems augment human intellect and interact with people to co-create new knowledge, technology, and organizations (Siddike et al., 2018a; 2018b).