Building Trust in the Untrustable

Trust is a major aspect in the relationship between humans and autonomous safety-critical systems, such as autonomous vehicles. Although human errors may cause higher risks, failures of autonomous systems are more strongly perceived by the general population, which hinders the adoption of autonomous safety-critical systems. It is therefore necessary to devise approaches for systematically building trust in autonomous functions and thereby facilitate the adoption process. In this paper, we introduce a method and a framework for incrementally building trust in the context of autonomous driving. Within the envisioned solution, we employ the psychological narrative behind trust building through the formation of new habits and introduce a method where trust is established gradually for both the human and the autonomous safety-critical system via reputation building and step-by-step integration of smart software agents replacing human actions.