前言

‘Abandon weapons first, then food. But never abandon trust. People cannot get on without trust. Trust is more important than life.’

Confucius to his disciple Tzu-Kung

“子贡问政。子曰：“足食，足兵，民信之矣。” 子贡曰：“必不得已而去，于斯三者何先？”曰：“去兵。” 子贡曰：“必不得已而去，于斯二者何先？”曰：“去食。自古皆有死，民无信不立。”

——孔子致弟子子贡

I was getting married on the day the hammer fell on Wall Street. The date was 14 September 2008. I had been living in New York for almost a decade and had met my then fiancé, Chris, in a downtown dive bar called Eight Mile Creek. We were both ‘city people’ but we wanted to have our wedding in a rural, rustic setting. The place we finally chose was called Gedney Farm, nestled in the charming old Berkshire village of New Marlborough, Massachusetts.

我在华尔街金融危机爆发那天结婚 。日期是2008年9月14日。我在纽约生活了近十年，在市中心一家名叫“八英里小溪”的潜水酒吧里遇到了当时的未婚夫克里斯。我们都是“城里人”，但我们想在乡村举行婚礼。我们最后选择的地方叫格尼农场，坐落在迷人的老伯克郡新马尔伯勒村，马萨诸塞州。

‘So, you want to get married in a horse barn?’ my father said when I showed him the venue, a Normandy-style red barn surrounded by lush meadows and abundant orchards. Getting into the spirit of things after that, he decided we should arrive at the venue in an old-fashioned horse and carriage. I went along with his Cinderella fantasy and climbed into an open-topped white carriage, complete with a driver and a footman, drawn by an old grey mare. The horse, on its last legs, was slow. It rained. I was late.

“你想在马厩里结婚?”当我带父亲看场地时，他说那是一个诺曼底风格的红色谷仓，四周是郁郁葱葱的草地和富饶的果园。在那之后，他进入了精神状态 ，他决定我们应该乘坐老式的马车到达会场。我跟着他的灰姑娘幻想，爬上一辆敞篷的白色马车，车上坐着一个司机和一个仆人，由一匹老灰马拉着。那匹奄奄一息的马走得很慢。下雨了。我迟到了

Around eighty guests, our closest family and friends from all over the world, joined us for the occasion. Lit by candles and strings of Edison bulbs, the ceremony was traditional and very beautiful. The best man’s speech was funny and the food was delicious, despite my finding grasshopper about the size of my little finger in the green salad.

大约有80位来自世界各地的亲朋好友参加了我们的婚礼。在烛光和一串串爱迪生灯泡的照耀下，婚礼传统而美丽。伴郎的演讲很有趣，食物也很美味，尽管我在绿色沙拉里发现了一个和我的小拇指大小的蚱蜢。

So there I was, at the heart of one ancient institution–marriage–built on trust and life-long commitment, while another–Wall Street–was imploding. Lost in the bubble of the celebrations, I didn’t realize the outside world was in meltdown until around 9.30 p.m., when I finally noticed that, around the room, the warm glow of the Edison bulbs was competing with the brash blue glare of iPhones and Blackberries as guests stealthily consulted their hand-held harbingers of doom. Family and friends who worked in banking were trying to absorb the barrage of messages flooding in. Could the impossible have happened? Lehman Brothers had just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Bank of America and Barclays had pulled out of a deal that might have saved the 158-year-0ld firm. Merrill Lynch had agreed to be bought by Bank of America for roughly $50 billion* in an attempt to avert a financial crisis. Washington Mutual, Wachovia and HBOS in the United Kingdom were within a whisker of collapsing. The fate of another giant, American International Group (AIG), the vanguard of the credit default swap market, teetered in the balance.

我就在那里，在一个建立在信任和终生承诺基础上的古老制度的核心，而另一个核心——华尔街——正在崩溃。沉浸在庆祝活动的气氛中，我直到晚上9点半左右才意识到外面的世界正在崩溃。当我终于注意到，在房间的四周，爱迪生(Edison)灯泡发出的温暖光芒正与 iPhone 和黑莓(blackberry)手机发出的炫目蓝色光芒形成竞争。在银行业工作的家人和朋友正试图消化潮水般涌入的大量信息。不可能的事会发生吗?雷曼兄弟刚刚根据美国破产法第11章申请破产保护。美国银行(Bank of America)和巴克莱(Barclays)退出了一项可能挽救这家拥有158年历史的公司的交易。为了避免金融危机，美林同意被美国银行以500亿美元的价格收购。华盛顿互惠银行(Washington Mutual)、瓦乔维亚银行(Wachovia)和英国哈里法克斯银行(HBOS)濒临破产。另一个巨头，美国国际集团(AIG)，信用违约互换市场的先锋，其命运也岌岌可危。

A couple of friends who were senior executives at JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs apologized for having to leave, summonsed to ‘red alert’ emergency meetings. It would be a race against the clock to avoid the blind panic that would surely happen when the markets opened. Several other guests drank nervously and partied hard, not sure if they would be carrying their work belongings out in boxes the following day. We danced the Horah, a traditional Jewish wedding ritual, which ended with me being elevated on a chair and my husband being thrown precariously up in the air on a large white tablecloth. Another moment of trust. Guests whirled around us, clapped and made ‘Oy! Oy! Oy!’ noises. Meanwhile, outside the barn, the biggest global financial crisis in history was building up a head of steam.

摩根大通(JP Morgan Chase)和高盛(Goldman Sachs)的几位高管朋友为不得不离开而道歉，他们被召集到红色预警紧急会议上。为了避免市场开盘时必然会出现的盲目恐慌，这将是一场与时间赛跑。其他几位客人紧张地喝着酒，开着派对，不确定第二天他们是否要带着他们的工作用品走人。我们跳了传统的犹太婚礼仪式“Horah”，最后我被抬到椅子上，我的丈夫在一张白色的大桌布上岌岌可危地被扔在空中。又是一个信任的时刻。客人们围着我们团团转，拍着手，发出‘噢！噢！噢！’的声音。与此同时，在谷仓外，史上最大的全球金融危机正在蓄势。

It was, of course, the beginning of the nerve-shattering period when many businesses ‘fell off a cliff’ and the world’s financial system came closer to collapse than at any time since the Great Depression. As we now know, the economic repercussions of the meltdown would engulf the world for many years to come. But my wedding day, rich with tradition, also marked the downfall of something more profound: public trust in institutions.

当然，这是一个惊心动魄的时期的开始，当时许多企业“跌下悬崖”，全球金融体系比大萧条(Great Depression)以来的任何时候都更接近崩溃。正如我们现在所知，经济崩溃的经济影响将在今后许多年吞噬世界。但我的婚礼，充满了传统，也标志着一种更深远的东西的没落:公众对机构的信任。

Who was to blame for the crisis? What were the main causes? These questions were at the heart of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) created to investigate the banking collapse, and the answer was damning. ‘The crisis was the result of human action and inaction, not of Mother Nature or computer models gone haywire,’ the 525-page report found. ‘To paraphrase Shakespeare, the fault lies not in the stars, but in us.’ In other words, the meltdown was an ‘avoidable’ human disaster.

谁应该为这场危机负责?主要原因是什么?这些问题是金融危机调查委员会(Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission，简称FCIC)的核心问题，FCIC是为调查银行业崩溃而成立的，而答案是毁灭性的。这份长达525页的报告发现，这场危机是人类行动和不行动的结果，而不是大自然或计算机模型失控的结果。‘套用莎士比亚的话说，错误不在于天上的星星，而在于我们自己’。换句话说，崩溃是一场“可避免”的人类造成的灾难。

The federal inquiry hammered the embarrassing failures of regulators, whom the report described as ‘sentries not at their posts’. The finger was pointed squarely at the Federal Reserve for its failure to question widespread, egregious mortgage lending, overreliance on short-term debt and the excessive packaging and reselling of loans, along with many other red flags. According to the report, however, the main culprit was not the toxic financial instruments but the human failings that drove them: reckless risk-taking, greed, incompetence, stupidity and a systemic breakdown in accountability and ethics.

联邦调查对监管机构令人尴尬的失职行为进行了猛烈抨击，报告称这些监管机构是“不守在岗位的岗哨”。人们将矛头直指美联储(Federal Reserve)，原因是它未能对广泛的、令人震惊的抵押贷款、对短期债务的过度依赖、贷款的过度打包和转售，以及其他许多危险信号提出质疑。然而，根据这份报告，罪魁祸首不是有毒的金融工具，而是驱动它们的人性弱点:不计后果的冒险、贪婪、无能、愚蠢，以及问责制的系统性崩溃。

It wasn’t the first nail in the coffin of institutional trust and it probably won’t be the last, but the financial crisis struck deep.

这不是机构信任棺材上的第一颗钉子，也可能不会是最后一颗，但金融危机影响深远。

A loss of trust amounts to a lack of faith and confidence in ‘the system’ itself. What should we believe in if the system has failed us? Who, or what, can be relied upon? We begin to fear what else can go wrong. What other shortcomings we don’t yet know about might lurk in the system? Fear, suspicion and disenchantment are deadly viruses that spread fast. The initial epicenter of the trust explosion was, understandably, with the banks. But it hasn’t stopped there. Since the crisis, other scandals, other revelations, have seen the ripples of distrust touch government, the media, charities, big business and even religious organizations.

失去信任就等于对系统本身缺乏信心。如果这个体系让我们失望了，我们应该相信什么?谁，或者什么，可以信赖?我们开始担心还会出什么问题。还有哪些我们还不知道的可能潜伏在这个系统中的漏洞呢?恐惧、怀疑和幻灭是快速传播的致命病毒。可以理解，最初信任地震爆发的中心是银行。但它并未就此止步。自金融危机以来，其他的丑闻，其他的揭露，已经看到不信任的涟漪触及政府，媒体，慈善机构，大企业，甚至宗教组织。

Like the plot of some overblown soap opera or Jacobean tragedy, the episodes of unethical behaviour have come thick and fast, from the lurid, even criminal, to the just plain stupid and, sadly, routine. Each has chipped away at public confidence. The British MPs’ expenses scandal; the false intelligence about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs); Tesco’s horsemeat outrage; price gouging by big pharma; the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill; the dishonours of FIFA’s bribery; Volkswagen’s ‘diesel gate’; major data breaches from companies such as Sony, Yahoo! and Target; the Panama Papers and widespread tax avoidance; the exchange-rate manipulation by the world’s largest banks; Brazil’s Petrobras oil scandal; the lack of an effective response to the refugee crises; and, last but not least, shocking revelations of widespread abuse by Catholic priests, other clergy and other ‘care’ institutions. No wonder a thousand headlines lament that nobody trusts authority any more. Corruption, elitism, economic disparity–and the feeble responses to all of the above–have pummelled traditional trust in the old institutions as fiercely as a brutal wind lashing ancient oaks.

就像一些夸张的肥皂剧或雅各比悲剧的情节一样，不道德行为的情节层出不穷，从耸人听闻的，甚至是犯罪的，到愚蠢的，可悲的，司空见惯的。每一个都削弱了公众的信心。英国议员的开支丑闻;关于大规模毁灭性武器的虚假情报;乐购的马肉的愤怒;大型制药公司哄抬价格;英国石油公司深水地平线漏油事件;国际足联受贿的耻辱;大众的“柴油门”;索尼、雅虎等公司的重大数据泄露事件。和目标;巴拿马文件和广泛的避税;世界上最大的银行操纵汇率;巴西国家石油公司(Petrobras)石油丑闻;对难民危机缺乏有效的反应;最后但并非最不重要的是，有关天主教神父、其他神职人员和其他“关爱”机构普遍虐待儿童的令人震惊的爆料。难怪成千上万的报纸头条哀叹再也没有人信任权威了。腐败、精英主义、经济上的蔑视——以及对上述种种的无力回应——像狂风猛烈地吹动着古老的橡树一样，重创了人们对旧制度的传统信任。

Significantly, this crisis is taking place in a landscape of rapidly shifting and evolving technologies, from artificial intelligence (AI) to automation to the Internet of Things (IOT). We are already putting our faith in algorithms over humans in our daily lives, whether it’s trusting Amazon’s recommendations on what to read or Netflix’s suggestions on what to watch. But this is just the beginning. We will soon be riding around in self-driving cars, trusting our very lives to the unseen hands of technology.

值得注意的是，这场危机发生在从人工智能(AI)到自动化再到物联网(IOT)的技术迅速转变和发展的背景下。在我们的日常生活中，我们已经把对算法的信任置于人类之上，无论是相信亚马逊(Amazon)关于阅读内容的建议，还是Netflix关于观看内容的建议。但这仅仅是个开始。我们很快就会乘坐自动驾驶汽车，把自己的生命托付给看不见的技术之手。

At the same time, many people are feeling so overwhelmed by the pace of change and the sheer amount of knowledge now available at a swipe or keystroke that they are beating a retreat to media echo chambers that narrow down information and reinforce already held beliefs. It becomes easy to ignore or simply not see contrary views. Technology, for all its pluses, also means falsehoods and ‘fake news’ can quickly spread through networks unchecked and with an unstoppable momentum. In fact, online misinformation on a grand scale–and the potential for digital wildfires–was listed by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 2016 as one of the major risks to our society. The result of those echo chambers and that misinformation? Our fears are verified, often baselessly. Our anger is amplified. The cycle of distrust is magnified. All in all, our faith in many institutions has been dragged to a critical tipping point.

与此同时，许多人对（时代）变化的速度和现在只需轻轻一击或敲击键盘就能获得的大量知识（的现状）感到如此不堪重负，以至于他们纷纷退到媒体的回音室，缩小信息范围，强化已经存在的信念。人们很容易忽视或根本看不到相反的观点。技术的所有优点也意味着，虚假新闻和假新闻可以不受控制地迅速在网络上传播，而且势头不可阻挡。事实上，2016年世界经济论坛(WEF)将大规模的网络误传和发生数字鬼火的可能列为我们社会面临的主要风险之一。那些回音室和那些错误信息的结果是什么?通常是毫无根据的，我们的恐惧得到了证实。我们的愤怒被放大了。不信任的循环被放大了。总之，我们对许多机构的信心已经被拖到了一个关键的临界点。

Indeed, recent gloomy poll numbers would have any politician or business leader in a sweat. For the past seventeen years, the global communications firm Edelman has been conducting an annual ‘Trust Barometer’, asking more than 30,000 people across twenty-eight countries about their level of trust in various institutions. The headline for the 2017 results was, tellingly, ‘Trust in Crisis’. Trust in all four major institutions–government, the media, business and non-governmental organizations (NGOs)–is at an all-time low. The media suffered the biggest blow, now distrusted in 82 per cent of all countries surveyed. In the UK, the number of people saying they trusted the media fell from 36 per cent in 2016 to 24 per cent in 2017. ‘People now view media as part of the elite,’ says Richard Edelman, President and CEO of PR firm Edelman. ‘The result is a proclivity for self-referential media and reliance on peers.’ In other words, looking to reinforce what we already believe, often from people we know.

事实上，最近低迷的民调数字会让任何政客或商界领袖冒冷汗。过去17年，全球通信公司爱德曼(Edelman)每年都会进行一次信任晴雨表调查，询问28个国家的3万多人对各种机构的信任程度。很明显，2017年的总体结果是对危机的信任。对所有四个主要机构- -政府、新闻媒介、商业和非政府组织- -的信任都处于空前的低点。媒体受到的打击最大，82%的受访国家对媒体表示不信任。在英国，表示信任媒体的人数比例从2016年的36%降至2017年的24%。公关公司爱德曼(Edelman)的总裁兼首席执行长埃德尔曼(Richard Edelman)说，‘现在人们把媒体视为精英的一部分。其结果是产生了一种以自我为参照的媒体倾向，以及对同龄人的依赖’。换句话说，（我们）通常是从我们认识的人那里去强化我们已经相信的东西。

The Brexit vote to leave the European Union and the election of Donald Trump are the first wave of acute symptoms emerging from one of the biggest trust shifts in history: from the monolithic to the individualized. Trust and influence now lie more with ‘the people’–families, friends, classmates, colleagues, even strangers–than with top-down elites, experts and authorities. It’s an age where individuals matter more than institutions and where customers are social influencers that define brands.

英国脱欧公投和唐纳德•特朗普(Donald Trump)当选美国总统，是历史上最大的信任转变之一——从单一到个性化——出现的第一波急性症状。如今，信任和影响力更多地取决于人们的家人、朋友、同学、同事，甚至陌生人，而不是自上而下的精英、专家和权威。在这个时代，个人比机构更重要，消费者是定义品牌的社会影响者。

By asking challenging questions about the flawed structure and size of institutional systems, and who runs them, we are coming to another confronting realization. Institutional trust, taken on faith, kept in the hands of a few and operating behind closed doors, wasn’t designed for the digital age.

通过提出有关结构和规模有缺陷的制度体系，以及由谁来管理这些体系的富有挑战性的问题，我们正走向另一个对立的现实。机构间的信任，建立在信念之上，掌握在少数人手中，并在幕后运作，不是为数字时代而设计的。

It wasn’t designed for an age of radical transparency, of WikiLeaks and Cryptome, where politicians and CEOs must imagine they are operating behind clear glass. Trying to hide, well, anything really, is a high-stakes gamble. It doesn’t work in a world where PR puffery can no longer cover up dirty secrets or closed-door antics. Take a few recent examples of ‘private’ matters that have been spilled around the world: the sensitive user data of the extra-marital dating site Ashley Madison, Turing Pharmaceuticals’ internal emails on its predatory drug pricing, secret Scientology manuals, Hillary Clinton’s emails and even a private conversation that took place within a private palace garden between the Queen of England and the Metropolitan Police Commander about the rudeness of Chinese officials.

它不是为维基解密(WikiLeaks)和密码系统(Cryptome)这样一个极度透明的时代设计的，在这个时代，政客和首席执行官们必须想象自己是在透明的玻璃后面工作。试图隐藏，嗯，任何事情，都是一场高风险的赌博。在这样一个世界里，公关吹嘘再也无法掩盖肮脏的秘密或闭门造车的行为，这是行不通的。举一些近期‘秘密’的事情传播到全世界的例子:婚外情交友网站 Ashley Madison 的敏感用户数据,图灵制药内部邮件的掠夺性定价、秘密科学论文手册，希拉里·克林顿的电子邮件，甚至发生在私人宫殿花园里面的英国女王和伦敦警察指挥官之间有关中国官员的无礼行为的对话。

It wasn’t designed for an age where people can transact directly on platforms such as Airbnb, Etsy and Alibaba. It wasn’t designed for an era where it is predicted half of the workforce will be ‘independent workers’–freelancers, contractors and temporary employees–within the next decade. It wasn’t designed for a time where we have become dependent on tech powerhouses such as Facebook and Google which represent new forms of ‘network monopolies’ and platform capitalism. It wasn’t designed for a culture where we want to control everything personally, from our bank accounts to our dates, with a swift click, tap or a swipe.

它不是为一个人们可以在爱彼迎（Airbnb）、Etsy 和阿里巴巴(Alibaba)等平台上直接交易的时代而设计的。它不是为这样一个时代而设计的:在未来十年，预计一半的劳动力将是“独立工人”——自由职业者、承包商和临时工。它不是为一个我们已经变得依赖 Facebook 和谷歌等科技巨头的时代而设计的，这些公司代表着新型的“网络垄断”和平台资本主义。它不是为这样一种文化而设计的，在这种文化中，我们想要通过快速点击、敲击、滑动来控制从我们的银行账户到我们的约会对象——一切自己的事情。

So should we be mourning the loss of trust? Yes, and no, because here’s the thing: whatever the headlines say, this isn’t the age of distrust–far from it. Trust, the glue that holds society together, hasn’t disappeared. It has shifted–and the implications, for everything from hiring a babysitter to running a business, are massive.

那么，我们应该哀悼信任的丢失吗?是的，也不是，因为事实是这样的:无论头条新闻怎么说，这都不是不信任的时代——远非如此。信任，维系社会的粘合剂，并没有消失。它已经发生了变化——从雇佣保姆到经营企业，其影响是巨大的。

For the past decade, I have been researching how technology is radically changing our attitudes towards trust. In 2008, I started writing my first book, What’s Mine is Yours, about the so-called ‘collaborative’ or ‘sharing economy’. I was fascinated by how technology could unlock the value of idle assets–cars, homes, power drills, skills, time–but it was the trust ingredient, how technology could make us engage in behaviors that might previously have been considered a little creepy or outright risky, that became my obsession.

在过去的十年里，我一直在研究技术是如何从根本上改变我们对信任的态度的。2008年，我开始写我的第一本关于所谓的“合作”或“共享经济”的书——《我的就是你的》。我着迷于科技如何释放闲置资产的价值——汽车、住宅、电钻、技能、时间——但它是信任的组成部分，科技如何让我们从事以前可能被认为有点令人毛骨悚然或完全有风险的行为，这成为了我痴迷的东西。

Even then, the notion of building a marketplace based on letting strangers stay in other people’s houses seemed ludicrous. Today, Airbnb, the home-sharing marketplace, is valued at $31 billion, making it the second most valuable hospitality brand in the world. In 2008, it was hard to see how detailed online profiles would give people the confidence to get lifts with strangers operating as cab drivers and using their own cars. Today, Uber is valued at $68 billion, making it one of the biggest companies in the world, larger than FedEx, Deutsche Bank or Kraft Foods. And then there is the explosion of online dating apps such as Tinder, where the average number of daily swipes is more than 1.4 billion with 26 million matches made daily. These are just a handful of examples where online tools are enabling us to have face-to-face interactions and entrust strangers with our most valuable possessions, experiences, even our lives, in previously unimaginable ways.

即使在当时，建立一个让陌生人住在别人房子里的市场的想法似乎是可笑的。如今，房屋共享平台 Airbnb 的估值为310亿美元，是全球第二大最有价值的酒店品牌。2008年，很难想象网上详细的个人资料能给人们带来多大的信心，让他们在陌生人驾驶出租车或自己开车的情况下搭车。今天, Uber 价值680亿美元,使其成为世界上最大的公司,超过联邦快递,德意志银行(Deutsche Bank)和卡夫Foods.还有网上交友应用 Tinder,每日滑动的平均次数超过14亿和日均2600万场匹配。这些仅仅是少数的例子，在这些例子中，在线工具使我们能够面对面的交流，并以以前无法想象的方式将我们最宝贵的财产、经历，甚至我们的生命托付给陌生人。

Consider this: why do people say they don’t trust bankers or politicians yet trust strangers to share a ride with them?

想想看:为什么人们说他们不信任银行家或政客，却信任陌生人让他们搭顺风车?

One conventional explanation is that people don’t always tell the truth in surveys. That may be so, but there had to be more to this trust paradox. I had a hunch something deeper was happening. What if trust, like energy, cannot be destroyed and instead just changes form?

一个传统的解释是人们在调查中不总是说实话。也许是这样，但这种信任的矛盾肯定不止这些。我预感到更深层次的事情正在发生。如果信任，就像能量一样，不能被摧毁，只能改变形式，那该怎么办?

Who Can You Trust? charts a theory, a bold claim: we are at the start of the third, biggest trust revolution in the history of humankind. When we look at the past, we can see that trust falls into distinct chapters. The first was local, when we lived within the boundaries of small local communities where everyone knew everyone else. The second was institutional, a kind of intermediated trust that ran through a variety of contracts, courts and corporate brands, freeing commerce from local exchanges and creating the foundation necessary for an organized industrial society. And the third, still very much in its infancy, is distributed.

你能信任谁? 说一个理论，一个大胆的主张：我们正处于人类历史上第三次、也是最大的信任革命的开端。当我们回顾过去，我们可以看到信任分为不同的阶段。第一个是当地性的，当我们生活在一个小的地方社区的边界里，在那里每个人都认识其他人。第二个是公共机构的，一种通过各种合同、法院和企业品牌运作的中介信托，将商业从地方交流中解放出来，为有组织的工业社会创造必要的基础。第三个，仍然处于起步阶段，是分布式的。

A trust shift need not mean the previous forms will be completely superseded; only that the new form will become more dominant. For example, a small farming community may continue to rely on centuries-old local trust in some matters, but turn more often to the new town court to handle others.

信任的转变并不意味着以前的形式将被完全取代;只有这样，新形式才会变得更具统治力。例如，一个小的农业社区可能会在一些事情上继续依赖几个世纪以来的当地信任，但更多的时候会求助于新的城镇法院来处理其他事情。

Trust that used to flow upwards to referees and regulators, to authorities and experts, to watchdogs and gatekeepers, is now flowing horizontally, in some instances to our fellow human beings and, in other cases, to programs and bots. Trust is being turned on its head. The old sources of power, expertise and authority no longer hold all the aces, or even the deck of cards. The consequences of that, good and bad, cannot be underestimated.

信任过去流向裁判、监管者、权威人士、专家、看门狗和看门人，现在则横向流动，在某些情况下流向人类，在另一些情况下流向程序和机器人。信任正在被颠覆。旧的权力、专业知识和权威来源不再拥有所有的王牌，甚至一副牌。其后果，无论好坏，都不能低估。

The explosive growth of the sharing economy is a textbook example of distributed trust at play. But the theory is also a way to understand the rapid evolution of platforms like the darknet, where consumers are happily scoring everything from marijuana to AK-47s from ‘untrustworthy’ dealers. The darknet and the new era of digitally enabled app intimacy may sound as if they have little in common, but they share the same underlying principle–people trusting other people through technology.

共享经济的爆炸性增长是分布式信任发挥作用的典型例子。但这一理论也是一种理解“暗网”(darknet)等平台快速发展的方式。在“暗网”上，从‘不值得信任的’经销商的大麻到 AK -47步枪，消费者都在乐得为各种东西打分。“暗网”和数字应用亲密关系的新时代听起来似乎没有什么共同之处，但它们有着相同的基本原则:人们通过技术信任他人。

Distributed trust explains why we are now feverishly scoring and rating everything from restaurants to chatbots to Uber drivers (and why passengers are rated, too), helping to shape, almost instantly, the rise or fall of all sorts of businesses, while also creating reputation trails where one mistake or misdemeanour could follow us potentially for the rest of our lives.

分布式信任解释了为什么我们现在从餐馆聊天机器人到 Uber 司机(为什么乘客也被评价)都在狂热地评分和评级，促进近乎一瞬的商业成功或失败,同时建立声誉记录,一个错误或行为不端可能跟随我们一辈子。

Distributed trust helps us understand why digital cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether could be the future of money, and how the blockchain (the underlying ledger technology that powers these cryptocurrencies) could be used for everything from tracking the source of foods or blood diamonds to selling our homes without the need for estate agents.

分布式信任有助于我们理解为什么数字加密货币比如比特币和以太币可能成为未来的货币,以及为什么区块链(底层分布式技术为加密货币赋能)可以用于从跟踪食物的来源或血钻销售到出售我买的房产而不需要房地产经纪人。

Distributed trust helps us grapple with why and how we’ll come to trust well-trained bots, whether they’re giving us relationship advice, resolving our parking tickets, ordering our sushi or telling us if we have cancer.

分布式信任帮助我们解决为什么以及怎样信任训练有素的机器人的问题，它们是否会给我们提供情感关系的建议，解决我们的停车罚单，帮我们点寿司，或者告诉我们是否患有癌症。

Indeed, I believe the real disruption happening is not technology itself, but the massive trust shift it creates.

事实上，我认为真正发生的颠覆不是技术本身，而是它带来的信任的巨大转变。

Distributed trust is not simply a new, idealistic flavour of techno libertarianism. There are many stories in this book that show how it can have negative, dark or disastrous consequences–discrimination, theft and even death. Yes, technology can widen the circle of trust, unlocking the potential to collaborate and connect with unfamiliar strangers, but it can also erect and harden boundaries between us. Ratings and reviews may make us more accountable, even a little nicer, to our fellow human beings but our growing reliance on them also means some people will become forever tarnished, relegated to a kind of digital purgatory. And, in our rush to reject the old and embrace the new, we may end up placing too much trust, too easily, in the wrong places.

分布式信任不仅仅是一种技术自由主义的新的、理想主义的味道。在这本书中有很多故事展示了它是如何产生负面的，黑暗的或灾难性的后果——歧视，盗窃，甚至死亡。是的，技术可以扩大信任圈，释放与不熟悉的陌生人合作和联系的潜力，但它也可以建立和激化我们之间的界限。评级和评论可能会让我们对自己的同胞更负责任，甚至更友善一些，但我们对它们的日益依赖也意味着，一些人将永远失去光彩，沦为某种数字炼狱。而且，在我们急于拒绝旧事物而拥抱新事物的过程中，我们可能会在错误的地方过于轻易地给予太多的信任。

It’s already becoming clear that the turpitudes of institutions, real or fabricated, have left many people dangerously receptive to alternatives, and ready to place unquestioning faith in a new, and some would say highly dubious, breed of trust arbiter. Distributed trust is far from foolproof and the questions that really matter are ethical and moral, not technical.

越来越明显的是，各种机构的动荡，无论是真实的还是虚构的，已经让许多人危险地接受了其他选择，并准备对一种新的、有人会说高度可疑的信任仲裁者，抱有毫无疑问的信心。分布式信任远非万无一失，真正重要的问题是在伦理和道德上的，而不是技术上的。

The first two chapters of this book pose a simple question: how did we end up here? They unpack why trust matters so much. The next three chapters explore the trio of conditions that make distributed trust possible–trust in a new idea, trust in platforms and, finally, trust in other people or bots. This section explains how to adapt to building trust in this new era and what to do when it’s lost. Critically, it asks who takes responsibility when trust is no longer centralized but distributed.

这本书的前两章提出了一个简单的问题:我们是如何走到这一步的?他们揭示了为什么信任如此重要。接下来的三章将探讨使分布式信任成为可能的三个条件:对新思想的信任、对平台的信任，以及对其他人或机器人的信任。本节将解释如何适应在这个新时代建立信任，以及在失去信任时该如何做。关键的是，当信任不再是集中的，而是分散的时候，它要求谁来承担责任。

Elsewhere, the book travels to the depths of the darknet to understand why reputation matters so much, even to cocaine dealers. It goes inside the Orwellian-like trust-scoring system that is emerging in China and could determine everything from a citizen’s job to whether they can get on a train or a plane.

在其他地方，这本书深入到暗网深处以了解为什么声誉如此重要，甚至对可卡因交易商。它描述了奥威尔式的信任评分系统，这种系统正在中国兴起，可以决定从公民的工作到他们能否坐火车或飞机的一切事情。

The final chapters look to our digital future, particularly focusing on our rapidly evolving trust in artificial intelligence. If we make a habit of trusting intelligent machines, does it become harder to build trusting relationships with people? The glorified promises of the blockchain are explored. Will this digital ledger really become the ‘Internet of Value’, as many enthusiasts claim? Will the big banks end up ‘taking over’ this technology originally designed to cut out the middlemen?

最后几章展望了我们的数字未来，尤其是我们对迅速发展的人工智能的信任。如果我们养成信任智能机器的习惯，那么与人建立信任关系会变得更困难吗?区块链的美好承诺被探索。这种电子账本真的会像许多发烧友宣称的那样，成为有价值的互联网吗?大银行最终会不会接管这项原本旨在省去中间商的技术？

Distributed trust, enabled by new technologies, is rewriting the rules of human relationships. It’s changing the way we view the world and each other, returning us to the old village model of trust in one sense, except that the community is global in scale and some of its invisible reins are being pulled by internet giants. Now more than ever it is critical to understand the implications of this new trust era: who will benefit, who will lose and what the fallout might be.

在新技术的支持下，分布式信任正在改写人际关系的规则。它正在改变我们看待世界和彼此的方式，让我们在某种意义上回到信任的旧农村模式，只是这个社区的规模是全球性的，它的一些无形的缰绳正在被互联网巨头拉着。现在比以往任何时候都更重要的是，我们要理解这个新信任时代的含义:谁将受益，谁将受损，以及后果可能是什么。

Why? Because without trust, and without an understanding of how it is built, managed, lost and repaired, a society cannot survive, and it certainly cannot thrive. Trust is fundamental to almost every action, relationship and transaction. The emerging trust shift isn’t simply the story of a dizzying upsurge in technology or the rise of new business models. It’s a social and cultural revolution. It’s about us. And it matters.

为什么?因为没有信任，没有对社会如何建立、管理、失去和修复的理解，社会就无法生存，当然也无法繁荣。信任几乎是每一个行动、关系和交易的基础。正在出现的信任转变，不仅仅是科技领域令人目眩的迅猛发展或新商业模式的崛起。这是一场社会文化革命。这和我们密切相关。这很重要。