Emerging technologies permeate and potentially disrupt a wide spectrum of our social, economic, and political relations. Various state institutions, including education, law enforcement, and healthcare, increasingly rely on technical components, such as automated decision-making systems, e-government systems, and other digital tools to provide cheap, efficient public services, and supposedly fair, transparent, disinterested, and accountable public administration. The increased interest in various blockchain-based solutions from central bank digital currencies, via tokenized educational credentials, and distributed ledger-based land registries to self-sovereign identities is the latest, still mostly unwritten chapter in a long history of standardized, objectified, automated, technocratic, and technologized public administration. The rapid, (often) unplanned, and uncontrolled technologization of public services (as happened in the hasty adoption of distance-learning and teleconferencing systems during Corona Virus Disease (COVID) lockdowns) raises complex questions about the use of novel technological components, which may or may not be ultimately adequate for the task for which they are used. The question whether we can trust the technical infrastructures the public sector uses when providing public services is a central concern in an age where trust in government is declining: If the government’s artificial intelligence system that detects welfare fraud fails, the public’s confidence in the government is ultimately hit. In this paper, we provide a critical assessment of how the use of potentially untrustworthy (private) technological systems including blockchain-based systems in the public sector may affect trust in government. We then propose several policy options to protect the trust in government even if some of their technological components prove fundamentally untrustworthy.

中文翻译：

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保持对技术化公共部门的信任

新兴技术渗透并可能破坏我们广泛的社会、经济和政治关系。包括教育、执法和医疗保健在内的各种国家机构越来越依赖技术组件，例如自动化决策系统、电子政务系统和其他数字工具，以提供廉价、高效的公共服务，并被认为是公平、透明、公正和负责任的公共行政。从中央银行数字货币到各种基于区块链的解决方案，通过标记化的教育证书，以及基于分布式账本的土地登记到自我主权身份，人们对各种基于区块链的解决方案的兴趣日益增加，这是标准化、客观化、自动化的漫长历史中最新的、仍然大部分不成文的章节，技术官僚和技术化的公共行政。急速，（通常）计划外和不受控制的公共服务技术化（如在冠状病毒病 (COVID) 封锁期间仓促采用远程学习和电话会议系统时发生的情况）引发了有关使用新技术组件的复杂问题，这些技术组件可能会也可能不会最终足以完成使用它们的任务。我们是否可以信任公共部门在提供公共服务时使用的技术基础设施的问题是在对政府的信任度下降的时代的核心问题：如果政府检测福利欺诈的人工智能系统失败，公众对政府的信心是最终击中。在本文中，我们对公共部门使用可能不可信的（私有）技术系统（包括基于区块链的系统）如何影响对政府的信任进行了批判性评估。然后，我们提出了几个政策选项来保护对政府的信任，即使它们的一些技术组件从根本上证明是不可信的。