A Perspective on Trust, Security and Autonomous Systems

We argue that the advent of autonomous systems profoundly changes the nature of security arguments. Whereas security in socio-economic systems fundamentally relies on human beings to be the ultimate resolvers of trust decisions, this can no longer be the case for truly autonomous systems. In order to understand how to build such autonomous systems there is a need to create a logical theory of trust and trustworthiness. This paper attempts to provide a logical interpretation of some of the early sociological insights into the nature of trust and trustworthiness and sets out a preliminary framework for discussing reasoning about trust and trustworthiness.