The thesis
In the AI era, trust does not disappear. It becomes more valuable, more contextual, and more dependent on durable signals that are expensive to fake. The cheap proxies we relied on, that an email is from who it says, that a voice on the phone is who it claims, are losing their reliability. The need for trust is not going anywhere. It is moving to signals that take time and accountability to build.
What I am watching
"Looks real" is no longer enough
For most of history, convincing was a decent proxy for authentic, because faking convincingly was hard. That proxy is breaking. When anything can be made to look and sound real, the appearance of authenticity stops being evidence of it. The signals that still mean something are the ones an attacker cannot cheaply reproduce.
The cost of deception is falling, so the cost of proof must rise
Deception used to carry friction: skill, time, money, risk. AI strips most of that away. When deception gets cheap, the only stable response is to make proof a little more deliberate, through verification that does not depend on how real something looks.
Durable signals are the ones that took time to build
A relationship with a track record. A public history of doing what you said you would. Reputation earned over years. These are expensive to fabricate precisely because they cannot be produced on demand. As fabrication gets cheaper, these go up in value.
Businesses will need new authenticity rituals
Callback verification, agreed code words, canonical channels, signed and provenanced communication. The specific rituals are still settling. The shift is that authenticity becomes something you actively prove and maintain, not something you assume.
Practical implications
- Treat verifiable trust as an asset to accumulate, not a cost to minimise. It is becoming scarce, which means it is becoming valuable.
- Build at least one authenticity ritual into anything that involves money, access, or credentials, before you need it.
- Make yourself easy to verify and hard to fake. The two are not in tension.
Current questions
- Which authenticity rituals survive contact with busy, distracted people, and which only look rigorous?
- Does provenance technology actually rebuild trust, or just move the forgery upstream?
- How do small operators signal durable trust without the reach of a recognised brand?