Will Trust You in Another World

This is going to be my first diversion from the regular teleportation story. A crazy thought came to my mind which deserves to be transfered to this extension of my mind.

Why do people trust others when they are transacting in web through say eBay? The answer is that each user gets a trust rating and since the user wants to continue to trade on the site the cost of losing the trust rating is high and thus the probability of default is less. This concept comes directly from the Game Theory's multiple turn games and is also the basis of the Credit ratings given to stocks and bonds. By making the ratings visible to everyone the information asymmetry is removed and there in lies the key to doubtless transactions.

So why don't we have such a thing in real life? We spend so much time to build trust with each person and this does percolates in some ways through our reputation, but in this process we tend to forgo business that does not come through a reliable route. There is thus a huge cost of building the trust and also huge losses in terms of the opportunity cost. So do we have a solution to this problem...

The first thing I thought of was a bit crazy. Why not have internet linked spectacles that can take a facial photograph of whoever we interact with and maps the facial characteristics to search for the individual's profile on the net and then bring out the trust rating on the spectacle screen such that we can see the rating beside the person. This will also solve the problem of remembering the names of everyone we meet. Can this be done? Well, why not? For all we know someone in Google might be working on this already. Then I wondered whether there is any solution which is more likely to happen.

I had recently come across this radically new concept called Second Life. In this world people can take avatars and do whatever they want. But when I looked outside the context of the game, I found the potential of this technology to be phenomenal. For starters, everyone who wants to do any transaction in real life can actually do it in this environment rather than face to face and apart from reducing travel cost can also gain complete information on the individual. It would be better if instead of avatars real time faces and their expressions can be projected to increase the tacit communication through this medium. I will be giving somemore of my thoughts regarding the Second Life technology in th future blogs.