"Trust equals less death - it's as simple as that" : Developing a Socio-technical Framework for Trustworthy Defence and Security Automated Systems

With the dramatic rise in the affordances of Automated Systems (AS) across the full range of industrial sectors, designing and implementing AS which are judged as trustworthy by their users is a key challenge facing systems developers, industrial managers and employees alike. However, for some domains, such as Defence and Security (DAS), the stakes are particularly high: a failure of the system could result in fatalities in significant numbers. Gaining a better understanding of the sociological and technical foundations of trustworthiness is critical for the sector, essential for both building trust and designing robust technical solutions to maintain this trust. This paper draws on new interdisciplinary research conducted in the Defence and Security (DAS) sector, exploring social and technical conditions and understandings of trustworthy automated systems. We argue that the distinctiveness of DAS brings some very specific challenges to both developers and users, but the findings of the research have also relevance to a wider variety of domains, especially those where the outcomes may be a matter of life and death.