Verify, Then Trust

MaryAnne Sterling asked me how we fix the distrust so many families feel toward AI. I told her I do not have a perfect answer, and I understand the skepticism. Social media, scams that run on technology, and voices on every channel predicting the end of jobs. The old saying is trust and verify. With technology right now I would turn it around. Verify, and build your trust one step at a time. Before you share anything sensitive, read the company's own privacy policy and settings. A chatbot can help explain the wording, but it cannot vouch for itself.

The step can be very small. Until a couple of weeks before we recorded, my father still had a flip phone, and it worked for him. His father was a New York City police officer in the 1940s, and my dad is fascinated by anything law enforcement. I showed him how to ask a chatbot about the history of the department, and he was thrilled. That is not a twenty-thousand-dollar robot. It is confidence, and confidence is what lets him raise his hand for the next thing when it comes.

The other lesson came slowly. My two aunts lived together, and being the computer scientist, I picked one solution for both of them. It took me about five years to see how silly that was. What one of them liked, the other would not touch. Every family is its own system, and one change can turn what worked yesterday into what fails today. So start today, start small, and keep checking that it still works.