Artificial Trust is a collection of essays, offering a framework for understanding complex systems. It’s an attempt to explain how algorithms can fail in the things we trust.
We rely on complex systems like our health, our society, and the internet. These in turn rely on mechanisms to govern themselves and to evolve. These mechanisms involve feedback and selective pressure, which in turn rely on some mechanisms of recognition and trust. Some of the problems we wish to understand better are:
When the systems we depend on fail, the ways in which they fail often have similarities. An interdiciplinary understanding of these mechanisms can help us manage failures and protect ourselves from them.
Steve Strassmann is currently a software engineer at Overjet.ai, a company applying AI to healthcare.
Steve was a founder of two venture-backed startups, and has held senior engineering roles at Benchling, Kyruus, Apple, Orange/France Telecom, and VMware, leading commercial projects at the forefront of mobile, cloud computing, and healthtech. He was CTO of Flipkey, a subsidiary of TripAdvisor.
He served as CTO of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, leading bipartisan efforts to digitally transform state government.
Steve mentors entrepreneurs at the Harvard iLab. He was Entrepreneur in Residence at the Dept. of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School, and a visiting scientist in the Dept. of Genetics and the Wyss Institute. His research interests include applications of synthetic biology to solving problems of security, identity, and data integrity, as well as the classification of pathologies which afflict learning algorithms.
Steve is an inventor on 7 patents, and has received three degrees from MIT including a PhD from the MIT Media Lab for work in artificial intelligence, as an advisee of Marvin Minsky.