Maintaining trust in a technologized public sector

Abstract Emerging technologies permeate and potentially disrupt a wide spectrum of our social, economic, political relations. Various state institutions, including education, law enforcement, healthcare, increasingly rely on technical components, such as automated decision-making systems, e-government other digital tools to provide cheap, efficient public services, supposedly fair, transparent, disinterested, accountable administration. The increased interest in various blockchain-based solutions from central bank currencies, via tokenized educational credentials, distributed ledger-based land registries self-sovereign identities is the latest, still mostly unwritten chapter long history standardized, objectified, automated, technocratic, technologized rapid, (often) unplanned, uncontrolled technologization services (as happened hasty adoption distance-learning teleconferencing systems during Corona Virus Disease (COVID) lockdowns) raises complex questions about use novel technological which may or not be ultimately adequate for task they are used. question whether we can trust infrastructures sector uses when providing concern an age where government declining: If government’s artificial intelligence system that detects welfare fraud fails, public’s confidence hit. In this paper, critical assessment how untrustworthy (private) affect government. We then propose several policy options protect even if some their components prove fundamentally untrustworthy.