6 Chapter 1 Introduction
her public transport account did not have sucient tokens. She looked at her smartwatch to
check the account balance.
“Login denied. Please contact your Citizens Advice Bureau!” her watch informed her.
A feeling of nausea hit her like a st to the stomach. She suspected what had happened. To
conrm her theory, she started the mobile game “Sniper Guild”, an ego shooter. The app
was directly closed again automatically, which conrmed her theory. She became dizzy and
sat down on the oor again.
There was only one possible explanation: Her Civic Trust Score had dropped. Substantially.
A small drop meant minor inconveniences, such as not getting rst class ights or having to
wait a little longer for ocial documents. A low trust score was rare and meant that you
were classied as a threat to society. One measure in dealing with these people was to keep
them away from public places such as the subway. The government restricted the nancial
transactions of subjects with low Civic Trust Scores. They also began to actively monitor
your behavior on social media and even went as far as to restrict certain content, such as
violent games. It became exponentially more dicult to increase your Civic Trust Score the
lower it was. People with a very low score usually never recovered.
She could not think of any reason why her score should have fallen. The score was based
on machine learning. The Civic Trust Score System worked like a well-oiled engine that ran
society. The performance of the Trust Score System was always closely monitored. Machine
learning had become much better since the beginning of the century. It had become so ecient
that decisions made by the Trust Score System could no longer be disputed. An infallible
system.
She laughed in despair. Infallible system. If only. The system has rarely failed. But it
failed. She must be one of those special cases; an error of the system; from now on an outcast.
Nobody dared to question the system. It was too integrated into the government, into society
itself, to be questioned. In the few remaining democratic countries it was forbidden to form
anti-democratic movements, not because they where inherently malicious, but because they
would destabilize the current system. The same logic applied to the now more common
algocraties. Critique in the algorithms was forbidden because of the danger to the status
quo.
Algorithmic trust was the fabric of the social order. For the common good, rare false trust
scorings were tacitly accepted. Hundreds of other prediction systems and databases fed into
the score, making it impossible to know what caused the drop in her score. She felt like a big
dark hole was opening in and under her. With horror she looked into the void.
Her tax anity system was eventually integrated into the Civic Trust Score System, but she
never got to know it.
Fermi’s Paperclips
Year 612 AMS (after Mars settlement): A museum on Mars
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